David Cook returns to the town of Wee Waa in country NSW for a weekend of Easter ministry and reflects on the enduring legacy of people he served with as their pastor over thirty years ago.

“They grew cotton, but they so lived and live that they robbed death of many of its prey, by pointing people to Christ. Their work was not in vain. Many of them are with Christ which is better by far. We will soon be there as well, awaiting our new resurrection body.”

Read the whole post here.

William Willimon muses on the implications of Jesus being the way:

Surely Jesus means more than simply his way of life (and death) is to be the disciples’ way. He doesn’t say that his philosophy is the way (as Plato might have said) but rather “I am the way… “ A person, rather than a doctrine or a belief, is the way. It’s similar to what he says elsewhere about being the Door and the Shepherd (10:7, 11), a saying much like Matthew 7:13f. Because Jesus is uniquely related to the Father, he is our way to the Father. Verse 14:7 is a statement about destination. When we see Jesus, we see the Father. To know Christ is to at last see God.
John Milbank says that modern theology is in the grip of a “false humility.” God? Oh God is too grand, too ethereal; therefore, it is impossible to say anything definitive about God.
We wish. If God were not incarnate in Christ, then we could make “God” mean anything we please. John 14:1 dares to assert that the one standing before us — this Jew who is soon to be crucified by an unholy alliance of church and state because of what he said and what he did — is our access to God. Belief in Jesus is not something added on to a belief in God, but rather belief in Jesus is our belief in God. Here, standing before us is not only the “way” but also the “truth” about God.

Read more here.

Five ways to recognise if a church newcomer is a church-shopper from Carey Nieuwhof.
“Trying to appease a serial church shopper is an exercise in pleasing the un-pleasable.”
Read the whole post here.

Helpful thoughts from Steve Brown reflecting on the conscious choice of Jesus to be involved in the lives of others, and all that choice entails.
What does that mean for us.

Jesus refused to be a loner. Jesus is God and one of his attributes is self-sufficiency. The Westminster Confession of Faith states, “God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made…” While that is of course true, there is so much more to be said. Paul wrote, “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:4-8). Jesus chose not to be a loner. And in so doing, Jesus chose pain…the inevitable result of being in relationship with other people. If you are committed to people, it is a commitment to pain, chaos, misunderstanding, conflict, anger, betrayal and pathos. Just ask Jesus. He knows.

Read the whole post here.

Randy Alcorn wonders why Christians seem so unhappy, and offers thoughts on why this should not be so.
There seem to be a lot of outraged Christians around, and they seem to be outraged in mirror to the culture of outrage that permeates public discourse.

…I see too many long-faced Christians who seem continuously angry, disillusioned, and defensive over politics and the infringement of their rights.
Francis de Sales, the bishop of Geneva (1567–1622), said, “I cannot understand why those who have given themselves up to God and his goodness are not always cheerful; for what possible happiness can be equal to that? No accidents or imperfections which may happen ought to have power to trouble them, or to hinder their looking upward.”[iv]
One explanation for our cheerlessness is simple: many of God’s people don’t believe that the Christ we serve is cheerful.
If we see God as happy, suddenly the command for us to “find your joy in him at all times” (Philippians 4:4, Phillips) makes sense. God is saying, in essence, “Be as I am.” Paralleling “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16, NIV), the answer to the question “Why should God’s children be happy?” is “Because our Father is happy.”
By studying and understanding what Scripture says about God’s happiness and ours, and letting those truths spill over into our lives, I believe we can reverse this trend. Then, even when we’re dealing with tough issues, both personally and in our culture, we can do so with a smile, and a sense of peace and pleasure in Christ. That doesn’t mean we back away from clearly sharing God’s revealed words, but it does mean that we do it with a spirit of grace and truth, seeking to be like Jesus (John 1:14).
Joy and laughter should be the church’s norm, not the exception.

Read the rest of the post here.

From an article on the St Helen’s blog:

We should walk into church with something of the following attitude.

1. Walk into church… as partners in the gospel
As Charlie preached to us from Philippians, he showed us that Paul was thankful for the Philippians partnership in the gospel (Philippians 1v5). And as he did so, there was a challenge for us: are we partners for the gospel in the same way? We should be like members of a rugby scrum, striving together towards the same goal. We should be like members of an impenetrable Roman shield wall, standing side-by-side, shoulder to shoulder, and relying on one another as we fight together.
We should not walk into church as mere church members, or church attenders, but as partners in the gospel, working together and doing what we can to see God’s kingdom grow.

2. Walk into church… as members of the same body
We are all to be partners in the gospel, but God has made us all very differently, and each of us different gifts and skills. In 1 Corinthians 12vv12-31, Paul explains that the church is one body, but it is made up of lots of different parts – arms, legs, eyes and so on. And the body needs each arm, leg, eye and nose to play its part to make the body work properly. The church needs every one of us, just as a body needs every one of its parts.
We should walk into church knowing that the church needs each one of us, eager to use the gifts God has uniquely given us to serve the body.

3. Walk into church… praying about where to sit
This final comment is copied unashamedly from the first chapter of Tony Payne’s excellent book “How to walk into church”. It is extremely short and easy to read, but it is excellent. I recommend it unreservedly.
Tony Payne observes that if we walk into church praying about where to sit, that puts us in the right frame of mind towards God. We acknowledge that God is in charge of every aspect of church, and that our ideas and preferences and dreams about what church should be like come a distant second. It also puts us in the right frame of mind towards each other. We begin to think about church as being about someone other than us, but as an opportunity for us to serve other people.
We should walk into church praying about where to sit. This attitude expresses perfectly what church is, and what it is we are doing there.

Read the whole post here.

A reflection on life, human expectation, personal growth, and what matters above all from Jean Williams.
An excerpt:

God is the author of my story. And he’s a far better author than I could ever be. I wouldn’t have written so much hardship into the recent pages of our life. But as I look back, I’m surprised to realise that, in some ways, the suffering is the part I’m most grateful for. It’s helped me see just how weak I am, and driven me to rely on God’s strength. It’s chased me into his arms, and deepened my knowledge of him. It compels me to set my hope on eternity rather than this life, and moves me to comfort others with the comfort I’ve received (2 Cor 1:3-7). I don’t fear the future like I used to, because God has been with me in the darkest times. I have tested him, and he has proved true. His faithfulness seems tangible to me now, solid rock under my feet. My faith is more stable, my joy more intense, and Jesus more precious. No one would ask for it – the grief, pain and fear – but in God’s mercy I have gained more than I have lost.
Of course, this perspective is only possible at one of those pauses in the story when you stop and reflect on what is past. On the darker pages that perspective is lost.
Read the whole post at Gospel Coalition Australia.

Balanced Christian teaching should invoke three areas, respecting their relative order, while maintaining the necessity of all three to be active.
The three are: what Jesus has done for us and to us; what Jesus enables and empowers us to do; and what we must do as our response to his work for us and in us in order to grow more like him.
If these three are all held at once licence, moralistic therapeutic deism, and legalism can be guarded against.
It also helps us ground responses to situations in life as questions that ask us how our response shows increasing trust in Jesus, greater dependence upon Jesus, and growing likeness to Jesus.
That’s the eternal dimension to every situation faced in this life.

Brian Chapell has an upcoming book Unlimited Grace.
Apparently there’s a new ministry called Unlimited Grace being launched too.

Here Chapell talks about how grace is not only the beginning of the Christian life, but it is also all of Christian living.

On the St. Helen’s Preaching Matters video blog William Taylor outlines an overview of the Gospels that looks for the author’s intent to train in discipleship and evangelism in ways that should shape our corporate and individual lives as Christians.
They are about what is to be believed and how we are to respond.

There are plenty of reminders in my internet referring to All Saints Day, a part of the church year remembered on November 1 and the first Sunday in November.
One feature of those reminders that I like is the process of consciously and deliberately remembering Christian mentors and friends who are no longer physically present but have passed from that which some call the church militant to the church eternal.
Speaking to a group in an aged residential home yesterday I reflected on the blessing of being raised by Christian parents, of having had Christians speak the Gospel into our lives as we were born again, of living in Christian community.
One facet of older life is that it can become a more solitary existence and diminish our sense of how the people of God who went before us, who were alongside us, and who follow us are a vital part of our lives.
It is good to think about what we have received, what we have shared, what we are leaving behind.
It is good to think about finishing well.
There may have been times when older Christians spoke into our lives words that we may have taken for granted, or which even sounded sentimental or trite:
“God is faithful.”
“The Lord is good, trust always in Him.”
“God’s grace was sufficient for me and it will be for you too.” 
As I spoke to those folk yesterday I mentioned that their personal experience of the passing of the years, the accrual of losses, the aches and pains of physical decay, the solitary nature of life; that all of these demonstrate that the testimony they’d heard from aged lips in many cases was anything but easy or sentimental.
It’s a tremendous investment made with loving care in the lives of others.
Having that spiritual and physical experience of what the good testimony of our older forebears involved increases our admiration for them, grows our thanks to God for the abundant provision of his grace toward his people, and challenges us to make sure we’re leaving a similar testimony of faith behind.
We know it’s an investment worth making, and we know it’s an investment that can be made.

Week by week worship is informed by a long-term desire to grow the theological health of the congregation by a balanced and comprehensive use of sources.

There is a temptation in our jobs to operate solely within the week-to-week grind. Many pressures (some of them beyond us) make it hard for us to step out of this tyranny of the urgent. For the sake of pastoring people well, we must lift our heads above the weekly fray to develop habits of long-range planning and mapping our congregation’s theological diet in worship, especially with songs. Just as no one meal can contain the full gamut of nutrition, so it is impossible for every week’s service to incorporate the entire theological spectrum mentioned above. Long-range planning allows a pastor to see how a congregation is being broadly theologised over the course of weeks and months.

The Worship Pastor, Zac Hicks, Zondervan, 2016, pp 75.

A significant aspect of Jesus’ character and identity was the fruit of prayer.
Those who follow him grow their character and identity the same way.
From Edmund Clowney at Ligonier:

They devoted themselves to prayer because they had devoted themselves to the Lord Jesus. They wanted to reflect Him, and they desired to serve Him. His resurrection and ascension lifted their praise to the Father’s throne. Luke gives us a taste of their prayer when Peter and John were released after they healed a lame beggar: ” ‘Lord, look on their threats, and grant to Your servants that with all boldness they may speak Your word, by stretching out Your hand to heal, and that signs and wonders may be done through the name of Your holy Servant Jesus’ ” (Acts 4:29–30). They persevered in prayer because they knew that God heard them. They knew that God’s sovereign will had been accomplished at the Cross. Their prayer, like Peter’s preaching, had been transformed by their understanding of the Cross.

Read the whole post here.

The first of two posts by Steve McAlpine interacting with the basic ideas expressed in the post by Murray Lean I linked to last week called The Creeping Trend Of Church Absenteeism.
Two significant points that I liked were firstly; McAlpine’s reservations about motivating people to more frequent attendance through guilt or greater effort.
And secondly; the observation that lower involvement levels are not simply that time spent at church is being invested with non-church organisations, because all organisations note greater difficulty in engaging younger people.
It calls for a rethink about the nature of church life and how we communicate what being part of church is.

For a start he [Lean] points out that growing secularisation is a part of the problem. Well it may be, but let’s be clear: it’s not just church that has seen a dramatic collapse in participation rates in the past forty years, it’s every form of volunteer organisation across the board in the Western world. And that issue runs far deeper than merely people not being bothered to turn up any longer.
We can hardly blame secularisation for secular organisations rapidly dwindling membership and loss of volunteer hours. Something deeper is going on at a cultural level that is enervating people and seeing them shy away from the growing complexities that volunteer organisations require. Deep structural changes in the culture are wearing people out, even before they get to work on a Monday morning.
Clearly something has changed in the wider culture than merely an increased list of busy activities that Christians, especially young families, find themselves signed up for.

Read the whole article here.

Zack Eswine reminds us that we don’t have to feel sorry for John the baptist.
He was not eclipsed by Jesus. He was everything he was meant to be.
There’s liberty in that lesson for all of us.
The freedom in admitting our limitations is that we get to follow John the Baptist’s footsteps and say, “I am not the Christ.”

It means that I don’t have to know everything, I don’t have to fix everything, and I’m not expected to be everywhere at once. I’m one person that God created and dearly loves, and I get to just be that one person.
It’s like what Jesus said in response to Peter at the end of the Gospel of John. Peter said, “Hey, what about John? What’s going to happen with John?” And Jesus said, “Don’t worry about him, I’ll take care of him. You follow me.”
There’s a great freedom in that. I don’t have to carry what’s going to happen to “John” on my shoulders—Jesus is going to carry that. I need to look to him and trust what he’s saying to me. I don’t have to take all of that on. Instead, I can just be the one person that I am, in the one place that I am, at the one time that I am, day by day. There’s great freedom in that.

Source.

Dan Rockwell observes that: “Building an environment of growth is one of leadership’s greatest challenges and opportunities.”
From his post:

Community:
Growth requires community. We stagnate and die in isolation. Everyone needs seclusion to refresh and reflect. But growth requires connection.

1. Who knowingly participates in your growth?
2. Whose growth are you actively encouraging?
3. Who knows your growth goals? Whose goals do you know?
4. How might you establish and nurture growth-connections between team members?

Confrontation:
Growth is a myth in environments that tolerate deceit, backstabbing, malevolence, and hypocrisy. Leaders who tolerate offenses against community – in the name of delivering results – destroy growth and limit results.

1. Never tolerate a high performer who destroys community.
2. Eliminate hypocrisy by practicing transparency regarding strengths, weaknesses, and development. Teams can’t pull for each other if they don’t know each other’s growth-goals.
3. Remove people who work to undermine others.

Source

Jen Oshman writes about the product of a tendency to desire a comfortable, easy to manage life – a comfortable easy to manage God.
From the article:

There’s a destructive cycle often lived out in Western, wealthy Christianity – and in my own heart. Here’s the cycle:

We Christians believe we have a small calling, so we call on a small god, and we grow a small faith. Our small faith fuels our small calling, which in turn perpetuates our belief that our god is small and asks us to do small things.

I’m attracted to this cycle as much as anyone. Messages to pursue safety and comfort engulf me. The dominant goals in my community are health, good education for our kids, a strong retirement account, and plenty of sports on the weekends. We’re all pursuing these goals, even in our churches. We’re cheering for one another as we chase our small dreams and claim it’s what our small god would want.
The calling is small because we can do it in our own power. We’re neck deep in self-help theology, and we applaud one another when we look within ourselves, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and do whatever it takes to self-actualize. If the God of the Bible doesn’t fit our small calling, we rewrite or misinterpret what he says.
Many churches in America have exchanged God’s true calling, God’s true character, and the true faith for a manageable, small cycle. But Jesus destroys the small cycle when he calls us to follow him and die.

Big Cycle
“If anyone would come after me,” Jesus said, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34–35). This call to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus is not small and manageable.
Scripture calls us to live out a big, risk-taking, self-denying cycle. To answer this call we need a huge God capable of doing huge things. We need a faith that’s robust and doesn’t reject hard things but acknowledges that the hard things are, in fact, what God has designed for our good and his glory. This cycle – the opposite of the small cycle – acknowledges our calling is big, our God is big, and he will give us a big faith to carry out our big calling.

Read the rest here.

Our human hearts were once described as factories that produce idols.
Jared Wilson points out that production can continue in the life of the Christian, and can occur in the settings in which we gather for worship each week.
From his post:

On Sundays, our sanctuaries fill with people seeking worship, and not one person comes in set to neutral. We must take great care, then, not to assume that even in our religious environments, where we put the Scriptures under so many noses, that it is Jesus the exalted Christ who is being worshiped.
Every weekend in churches everywhere, music is performed to the glory of human skill and artistry. Once upon a time, I sat through a little ditty in a church service in which the congregation was led to sing, “I can change the world with these two hands,” and the question struck me like a lightning bolt: “Who exactly am I worshiping right now?”
Likewise, every weekend men and women file into church buildings in order to exult in the rhetorical skill of their preacher, to admire him and think of their church as his church, not Christ’s church. Many of us file in each week to enjoy the conspicuous spiritual exercises of our brethren. We worship the worship experience; we tithe with expectation of return from heaven’s slot machine; we dress to impress; and we serve and lead to compensate for the inadequacies in our hearts that only Christ can fill. Every weekend, hundreds of preachers extol a therapeutic gospel from the pages of the same Bible where the real gospel lies. We Reformed are not exempt, as too often our affections are poured totally into doctrine with only vague admiration reserved for doctrine’s Author.
A church will become idolatrous in a heartbeat because it’s already there. So we cannot set our worship on autopilot. We cannot mistake the appearance of busy religiosity for worship in spirit and truth. We see in Exodus 32:5 that even the worshipers of the golden calf ascribed their worship to the covenant Lord Yahweh.
The gospel imperative, then, is to return again and again to the gospel indicative. Our first duty is “gospel obedience” (Rom. 10:16; 2 Thess. 1:8; 1 Peter 4:17), which is to stand at attention to Christ upon the gospel’s “ten hut.” Our hearts and minds flow through the rut of idolatry, but the deliberate proclamation of Jesus at every possible turn will force us off our idolatrous course. Martin Luther advises us:

I must take counsel of the gospel. I must hearken to the gospel, which teacheth me, not what I ought to do, (for that is the proper office of the law), but what Jesus Christ the Son of God hath done for me: to wit, that He suffered and died to deliver me from sin and death. The gospel willeth me to receive this, and to believe it. And this is the truth of the gospel. It is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consisteth. Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.

Tim Keller elaborates: “So Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel your heart will go back to operating on other principles unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode.”
The proclamation of the good news of Jesus and the extolling of his eternal excellencies is always an interruption, always a disruption. It alone will bring the sword of division between where even our religious hearts are set and where they ought to be. For this reason, we cannot go about minding our own business any more. We must mind God’s (Col. 3:1-4).

Read the rest here.

The joys of advancing years include a more necessary interest in personal health.
Stanley Gale observes that, by contrast, an individual’s spiritual health can be in jeopardy at any age, and that there are a number of commonly observable conditions that precede a breakdown in faith.

From Gale’s post:

What are the signs of spiritual heart failure? We can note at least six symptoms.

1. Attendance in weekly worship becomes optional and irregular. This is pretty serious. God designed us to be worshipers. He sought us to be worshipers. And He turned our hearts from idols to worship Him as the true and living God. You can be sure that neglect of corporate worship is a sign of a heart that is not given over to God in everyday life.
2. A spotty prayer life. Like shortness of breath and struggle for oxygen, irregular prayer does not breathe in the oxygen of God’s grace in continual awareness of Him and dependence upon Him. This condition often takes in shallow breaths of periodic prayer that fail to fill the lungs or hyperventilate in panic prayer in times of great distress.
3. Gospel habituation. Habituation is where you tune something out after a while, like you might not notice the loud ticking of a clock in your home but a visitor hears it loud and clear. We can do that with the gospel. It can become familiar, ordinary, and unamazing. God has given us ways to keep that from happening, like hearing Christ preached and celebrating the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, but our diseased heart doesn’t take it in.
4. Poor appetite and inadequate diet. God has given us a rich banquet in His Word, all the nourishment we need for our growth in grace. But we rarely partake. We don’t feast on it. We content ourselves with snacking on a nugget every now and then. But even then we don’t savor it. We don’t chew on it through attention and meditation, drawing out its flavor and absorbing its nutrients of truth.
5. Inactivity. A healthy heart has blood flow in and blood flow out. Heart failure affects this circulatory system. It becomes enlarged for lack of exercise. It doesn’t spread nutrients throughout its own body or the body of Christ. It does not look to serve but to be served, unlike the One whose heart was in perfect health. With no sense of sacrifice or suffering, it becomes weakened and ineffective.
6. Spiritual Listlessness. Indifference to the things of God and tolerance of what dishonors Him are signs of arterial sclerosis, hardness of heart. One contributing factor to this condition is isolation from fellow believers. Without them in our lives to stimulate us to love and godliness, our hearts can be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Separated from the body of which we are a part, our fire grows dim and our enthusiasm wanes.

How do we address spiritual heart failure? Prescription for each symptom is found in the Word of Life. But it begins by approaching the Great Physician, asking Him to “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Psalm 139:23–24)

Read the whole post here.

David Murray asks “Why do we take our individual, personality, character, gifts, or calling and make that the sum total of godliness for everyone else?”
After numerous examples of what he means, he sums up:
“Godliness should be measured not so much by what comes easiest to us but by the progress we’re making in areas we’re weakest in.”

Read the whole post here.