Lost

Powerful video here.




Essential books on missions:

Let The Nations be Glad
The Mission of God
Perspectives
Radical

Mike Horton Lends His Voice To The "Mission of the Church" Discussion

Michael Horton:

In recent days, Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert have taken a fair number of hits for their arguments in What is the Mission of the Church? (Crossway, 2011). (See one review here) The main worry is that they define the mission too narrowly, focusing on the Great Commission. At least on the more vehement side of the opposition, the concern is that there is no place for the church to have an impact on culture, particularly in social and economic terms. 

Having received some similar objections to my argument in The Gospel Commission (Baker, 2011), I think that many criticisms rest on basic confusion of categories. There are several examples that could be mentioned, but I’ll stick with this one: the confusion of the church as a divine institution (place) with the church as Christians (people).

Read the rest. I'll have thoughts on this later.  I am finding this discussion to be quite helpful for how we think about doing things at The Vine.

Blow Up The Bubble

Dietrich Bonhoeffer from"Life Together" quotes Luther:

"The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared?" (Martin Luther)

(HT: Carlos)

The Effect Of Seeing God's Mission

"When we grasp that the whole Bible constitutes the coherent revelation of the mission of God, when we see this as the key that unlocks the driving purposefulness of the whole grand narrative, then we find our whole worldview impacted by this vision. As has been well documented, every human worldview is an outworking of some narrative. We live out of the story or stories we believe to be true, the story or stories that "tell it like it is," we think. So what does it mean to live out of this story? Here is The Story, the grand universal narrative that stretches from creation to new creation, and accounts for everything in between. This is The Story that tells us where we have come from, how we got to be here, who we are, why the world is in the mess it is, how it can be (and has been) changed, and where we are ultimately going. And the whole story is predicated on the reality of this God and the mission of this God. He is the originator of the story, the teller of the story, the prime actor in the story, the planner and guide of the story's plot, the meaning of the story and its ultimate completion. He is the beginning, end, and center. It is the story of the mission of God, of this God and no other.

Now such an understanding of the mission of God as the very heartbeat of all reality, all creation, all history and all that yet lies head of us generates a distinctive worldview that is radically and transformingly God-centered. And my experience in wrestling with the massive contours of this Bible-sculpted, God-centered, mission-driven vision of reality, has been to find that it turn inside out and upside down some of the common ways in which we are accustomed to ask. This worldview, constituted by putting the mission of God at the very center of all existence, is disturbingly subversive and it uncomfortably relativizes one's own place in the great scheme of things. It is certainly a very healthy corrective to the egocentric obsession of much Western culture - including, sadly, even Western Christian culture. It constantly forces us to open our eyes to the big picture, rather than shelter in the cosy narcissism of our own small worlds."

- Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p.533

Christianity In Our World Today

• This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called "Christian Europe." Yet in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China; only in 1971 did the communist regime allow for one Protestant and one Roman Catholic Church to hold public worship services, and this was mostly a concession to visiting Europeans and African students from Tanzania and Zambia.
• This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined--and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the umber in those other African countries.
• This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were in congregations of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.
• This past Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations. About half of the churchgoers in London were African or African-Caribbean. Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background.
• This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia. [pp. 20-21]

- Taken from Mark Noll's new book, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith.

The God I Don't Understand - A Review

iMonk reviews Christopher Wright's, The God I Don't Understand. He writes:

While I haven’t mentioned him often on this blog, I’m very impressed with the work of theologian and Bible teacher Christopher J.H. Wright. Wright, like his obvious hero, John Stott, is undertaking serious Biblical theology in the cause of the church’s missional self-understanding. His recent book, The Mission of God, may be the best survey of the Bible as a text for being and doing church that is available for evangelicals.

Wright’s current book, The God I Don’t Understand, is, in his own words, a “meandering” exploration of three themes: the Biblical problem of evil/violence (particularly in reference to violence in the Bible itself), a theology of the cross and an overview of Biblical eschatology. But underneath this seemingly casual approach are first class examinations of some of the most troubling issues and questions that Christians face and ask.

Wright is a fine writer, easily accessible to non-professionals, with a special interest in the Old Testament. He’s written several books on the relation of the Old and New Testaments, as well as commentaries on Ezekiel and Deuteronomy. His work is richly Biblical, well organized and easily comprehended. He’s an outstanding teacher.

I would say a hearty "Amen!" to his assessment of The Mission of God. It's big, but I say it's a must read for all professing Christians. It will be worth your time and effort and you will see the big picture of your Bible in a much better and clearer way.

Click here for the rest of iMonk's review.

The Church in China

Writing for the Desiring God blog, Seth Magnuson reports on the state of the church in China. Read about it here.

Does God Care About Social Justice?

As most of you have probably figured out by now, I have been reading Christopher Wright's, The Mission of God. In the current chapter I am in he is discussing the exodus narrative and how some people tend to fall off into separate ditches of interpretation surrounding this narrative.

One would be the spiritualized interpretation that would go like this: In the exodus, God rescued his people from oppression in Egypt and conversely in the cross God has rescued his people from the oppression of sin.

The other ditch would be the politicized interpretation that basically says that we can see God passionately moved to justice on behalf of his people and thus we should be concerned about social justice as well.

Dr. Wright affirms that both of these views are important and clearly found in the exodus narrative, but most people tend to emphasize one over the other. In speaking to the first interpretation, I appreciate what he writes here:

This spiritualizing way of interpreting the Bible, and the missionogical implications that go with it, requires us to imagine that for generation after generation, century after century, the God of the Bible was passionately concerned about social issues - political arrogance and abuse, economic exploitation, judicial corruption, the suffering of the poor and oppressed, the evils of brutality and bloodshed. So passionate, indeed, that the laws he gave and the prophets he sent give more space to these matter than any other issue except idolatry, while the psalmists cry out in protest to the God they know cares deeply about such things.

Somewhere, however, between Malachi and Matthew, all that changed. Such matters no longer claim God's attention or spark his anger. Or if they do, it is no longer our business. The root cause of all such things is spiritual sin, and that is now all that God is interested in, and that is all that the cross dealt with. A subtle form of Marcionism underlies this approach. The alleged God of the New Testament is almost unrecognizable as the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel. This alleged God has shed all the passionate priorities of the Mosaic law and has jettisoned all the burdens for justice that he laid on his prophets at such cost to them. The implications for mission are equally dramatic. For if the pressing problems of human society are no longer of concern to God, they have no place in Christian mission - or at most a decidedly secondary one. God's mission is getting souls to heaven, not addressing society on earth. Ours should follow suit. There may be an element of caricature in the way I have sketched this view, but it is not unrepresentative of a certain brand of popular mission rhetoric.

It will be clear that I find such a view of God and of mission to be unbiblical and frankly unbelievable, if one takes the whole Bible as the trustworthy revelation of the identity, character and mission of the living God. But to repeat, I do not reject or reduce the terribly serious spiritual realities of sin and evil that the New Testament exposes, or the glories of the spiritual dimension of God's redemptive accomplishment in the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. I simply deny that these truths of the New Testament nullify all that the Old Testament has already revealed about God's comprehensive commitment to every dimension of human life, about his relentless opposition to all that oppresses, spoils, and diminishes human well-being, and about his ultimate mission of blessing the nations and redeeming his whole creation. Deriving our own missional mandate from this deep source precludes the kind of spiritualized reductionism that can read the exodus narrative, discern one vial dimension of its truth and yet bypass the message that cries out from its pages as loudly as the Israelites cried out in their bondage.

-Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 280,281

Election and Mission

"If we allow our doctrine of election to become merely a secret calculus that determines who gets saved and who does not, we have lost touch with the original biblical intention. God's calling and election of Abraham was not merely so that he should be saved and become the spiritual father of those who will finally be among the redeemed in the new creation (the elect, in another sense). It was rather, and more explicitly, that he and his people should be the instrument through whom God would gather that multinational multitude that no man or woman can number. Election is of course, in the light of the whole Bible, election unto salvation. But is first of all election into mission."

-Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 263, 264

The Living God Confronts Idolatry - Part 7

"...insofar as our mission assuredly also includes the dimension of spiritual warfare, we need to recognize that our primary aim is not to "win" but to serve. That is to say, the idols, gods, demons and spiritual powers against which we declare war in the name of the gospel of Christ and his cross are things that oppress and ravage human existence. False gods destroy and devour lives, health and resources; they distort and diminish our humanity; they preside over injustice, greed, perversion, cruelty, lust and violence. It is possibly the most satanic dimension of their deceptive power that, in spite of all this, they still persuade people that they are the beneficent protectors of their worshipers' identity, dignity and prosperity, and must therefore be defended at all costs. Only the gospel can unmask these claims. Only the gospel exposes the cancer of idolatry. Only the gospel is good for people.

Our missional motivation, therefore, needs to be carefully examined. Spiritual warfare is not a matter of triumphalism pervaded by a horrid spiritual of gloating superiority, in which we become obsessed with "winning a victory". Rather it is a matter of deep compassion for those oppressed by the forces of evil and idolatry - with all their attendant social, economic, political, spiritual and personal effects. We battle with idolatry because, like the God whose mission we thereby share, we know that in doing so we seek the best interestes of those we are called to serve in his name. We combat idolatry not only to glorify God but also to bless humanity. Spiritual warfare, like all forms of biblical mission, is to be motivated by and exercised with profound love, humility and compassion- as modeled in Jesus himself."

-Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 178 and 179

The Living God Confronts Idolatry - Part 6

"For we need to be clear that in the Bible the conflict with the gods is a conflict waged by God for us, not a conflict waged by us for God. To be sure, the people of God are involved in spiritual warfare, as countless texts in both testaments testify. However, it is assuredly not the case that God is waiting anxiously for the day when we finally win the battle for him and the heavens can applaud our great victory. Such blasphemous nonsense, however , is not far removed from the rhetoric and practice of some forms of alleged mission that place great store on all kinds of methods and techniques of warfare by which we are urged to identify and defeat our spiritual enemies. No, the overwhelming emphasis of the Bible is that we are the ones who wait in hope for the day when God defeats all the enemies of God and his people, and then we will celebrate GOD'S victory along with angels, archangels and all the company of heaven. Indeed, in the company of heaven we already celebrate the victory of the cross and resurrection of Christ, the Easter victory that anticipates the final destruction of all God's enemies."

-Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 178

The Living God Confronts Idolatry - Part 6

They say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’
and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’
For they have turned their back to me,
and not their face.
But in the time of their trouble they say,
‘Arise and save us!’
But where are your gods that you made for yourself?
Let them arise, if they can save you, in your time of trouble;
for as many as your cities are your gods, O Judah.
-Jeremiah 2:27-28

Kings, armies, horses, treaties, riches, natural resources - all these things are not really gods and are unbable to bear the weight of trust we put in them. However, what makes them into gods is that we insist on believing the spurious promises they make (or that we implicitly attribute to them). We keep on paying the enormous sacrifices they demand for our loyalty. And we keep on hoping against hope that they will not let us donw. But of course, they always do in the end. Idolatry is wasted effort and dashed hopes. The worship of false gods is the fellowship of futility, the grand delusion whose only destiny is disappointment.

So when the editorial in a British national newspaper once ended its sad analysis of a society in which two children could callously murder a toddler with the words "All our gods have failed," it doubtless intended the words only as a figure of speech. Sadly, such a metaphorical cry of despair also precisely captures the spiritual truth. Those things that we thought could deliever us from evil and in which we invested great amounts of intellectual, financial and emotional capital in the hope that they would deliever us, have instead spectacularly disappointed us. When will we ever learn?

-Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 176

The Living God Confronts Idolatry - Part 4

"False gods fail. That is their only truth. For although false gods never fail to fail, it seem humans never fail to forget that this is indeed the case."

-Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 171

The Living God Confronts Idolatry - Part 3

"It is significant therefore that the fear of the Lord plays such a central role in the Biblical worldview. It is a potent dimension of radical monotheism that if there is truly only one God, then He alone should be the object of our true fear. Then those who live in the fear of the Lord need live in fear of nothing else. Other objects of fear lose their divine power and their idolatrous grip. This is the testimony of the author of Psalm 34.

I sought the LORD and he answer me;
He delivered me from all my fears...
The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him
And he delivers them.
Taste and see that the LORD is good;
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
Fear the LORD, you his saints,
For those who fear him lack nothing (Ps. 34:4, 7-9)

Or as Nahum Tate put it, "Fear him, ye saints, and you will then have nothing else to fear."

The idolatrous power of fear is enormous and seems to bear no direct relation to the scale of what is feared. It has been pointed out that although in contemporary Western society we live lives that are immeasurably more safe, healthy and free from risk than any previous generation, yet we are consumed by anxieties, fears and neuroses. Fed by garish media hype, we swoon at the latest rogue virus and seem willing to spend exorbitant amounts on security measures that can never actually prevent the terror we struggle to fend off."

-Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 168

The Living God Confronts Idolatry - Part 2

"Once this fundamental distinction is blurred (Creator/creation distinction), once this reversal takes place, then devastating personal and social consequence follow. Creation, which derives its own meaning from God cannot give us in itself the ultimate meaning we crave, so idolatry is doomed to disappointment (to put it at is mildest). Worship of the self eventually implodes in narcissism, nihilism or sheer amoral selfishness. If nature itself is treated as divine, then all other distinctions begin to be dissolved. There is no difference between human life and all other forms of life. There is no difference between good and evil since all is ultimately one. So any objective reference point for moral discrimination becomes impossible.

In the light of such confusion the mission of God is ultimately to restore his whole creation to what it was intended to be - God's creation, ruled over by redeemed humanity, giving glory and praise to is Creator. Our mission, in participation with that divine mission, and in anticipation of its final accomplishment, is to work with God in exposing the idols that continue to blur the distinction, and to liberate men and women from the destructive delusions they foster."

-Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, p. 165

The Living God Confronts Idolatry - Part 1

"Arguably the most fundamental distinction in all reality is presented to us in the opening verses of the Bible. It is the distinction between the Creator God and everything else that exists anywhere. God along is uncreated, self-existent, noncontingent. God's being depends on nothing else outside God's own self. All other reality, by contrast, is created by God and therefore is dependent on God for existence and sustenance. The creation is contingent on God. It cannot and would not exist without God. God did and could exist without it. This essential ontological duality between two orders of being (the created order and the uncreated God) is foundational to the biblical worldview.

At the root, then, of all idolatry is human rejection of the Godness of God and the finality of God's moral authority. The fruit of that basic rebellion is to be seen in the many other ways in which idolatry blurs the distinction between God and creation, to the detriment of both.

Idolatry dethrones God and enthrones creation. Idolatry is the attempt to limit, reduce, and control God by refusing his authority, constraining or manipulating his power to act, having him available to serve our interests. At the same time, paradoxically, idolatry exalts things within the created order (whether natural objects in the heavens or on earth, or created spirits, or the products of our own hands or imaginations). Creation is then credited with a potency that belongs only to God; it is sacralized, worshiped and treated as that from which ultimate meaning can be derived. A great reversal happens: God, who should be worshiped, become an object to be used; creation, which is for our use and blessing, becomes the object of our worship."

- Dr. Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, taken from pages 163, 164 and 165