You can change

Years ago I started reading articles by Tim Chester that were published in a magazine/journal called "The Briefing". His approach to ministry was refreshing and I have since read a few of his books. The post here appeared on the Desiring God Blog not long ago.

I wanted my book on sanctification, You Can Change, to be an anti-self-help book written in the style of a self-help book! So each chapter is built around a question to ask of yourself and ends with questions to help readers work through an area of their lives they would like to change.

But the central message is that we cannot change ourselves through our own effort. Instead, we are changed by God through faith. The key is understand how the dynamic of change by faith takes place and how other disciplines (like avoiding temptation and the means of grace) fit into a faith-based approach.

Here’s how the book unfolds:

1. How would you like to change?

We were made in the image of God to reflect his glory in the world. Jesus is the true image of God who reflects God’s glory. Through Jesus we can again reflect God’s glory as we image his Son. So the change that matters is becoming more like Jesus so that we reflect God’s glory.

2. Why would you like to change?

We often want to change to prove ourselves to God or to other people or to ourselves. But this puts our glory at the centre of change and that is pretty much a definition of sin. Plus Jesus has proved us right or justified us through his death. Instead, we change to enjoy the freedom from sin and delight in God that God gives to us through Jesus.

3. How are you going to change?

We cannot change ourselves through rules and disciplines because behaviour comes from the heart. Instead God changes us through the work of Christ for us and the work of the Spirit in us.

4. What’s going on in your heart?

Our circumstances and struggles can trigger sin, but sin is caused by the thoughts and desires of our hearts.

5. What truths do you need to turn to?

We sin when we think or believe a lie instead of trusting God. Change takes place as, in response to God’s goodness and grace, we turn to him in faith. Legalism says, ‘You should not…’ Faith says, ‘You need not… because God is bigger and better than anything sin offers.’

6. What desires do you need to turn from?

We sin when we desire or worship or treasure an idol instead of worshipping God. Change takes place as, in response to God’s goodness and grace, we turn from idolatrous desires in repentance. This repentance is a continual act of turning from sin and denying self. It is often called ‘mortification’—putting to death whatever belongs to the sinful nature. Repentance is the flip-side of faith: we turn from sin in repentance as by faith we recognise that God is bigger and better than anything sin offers.

7. What stops you changing?

What stops us changing is our pride. Our pride makes us minimize or excuse or hide our sin. Or we think we can change on our own.

8. What strategies do you need to put in place to reinforce faith and repentance?

We are not to sow to the sinful nature. This means saying ‘no’ to whatever might provoke our sinful natures (which we do by fleeing temptation) and saying ‘no’ to whatever might strengthen our sinful desires (which we do by avoiding the influence of the world). Instead, we are to sow to the Spirit. This means saying ‘Yes’ to whatever might strengthen our new, Spirit-given desire for holiness (which we do through the word, prayer, community, worship, service and so on).

9. How can we support one another in change?

God has given us the Christian community so that we can change together by speaking the truth in love to one another to reinforce faith and repentance.

10. Are you ready for a lifetime of daily change?

Change is a lifelong, daily struggle that will end with an eternal harvest of holiness.

The key moves in the book, but also the key moves for anyone wanting to help others change are:

ensuring the what, why and how of change are God-oriented not self-oriented (otherwise we will just produce more effective legalists);
moving the discussion from merely looking at behaviour to looking at the affections of the heart;
showing how change takes place through daily faith and repentance, and making this connection concrete for people;
introducing the ideas of fleeing temptation and discipling life only once this foundation has been built as means to reinforce faith and repentance rather mechanisms for self-induced changed;
showing how the Christian community is the normative context for change and how we can help one another change.

I have been intrigued by LaCrae and Trip Lee and others who are communicating good theology through Rap these days. Christianity Today has an article on some of these guys that you can download in PDF format.

Don’t Merely Defend the Bible. Know What’s in it.

This is worth taking a few minutes to read...

Perhaps before we go out to defend that the Bible is absolutely true, binding, and authoritative we should make sure that the people we are talking to actually understand what the Bible says. It seems to be that more and more people that I talk to really don’t know what the Bible is about.

When we talk to people using phrases that we understand – sin, faith, judgment, hell, heaven, repentance, Jesus, the cross, resurrection, etc. – we need to know that they might have no idea what these words really mean. Hardly anyone knows what sin is and why it’s serious. How can they be helped if we simply tell them, “You can be forgiven of your sins if you repent and believe in the Gospel”?

The rest is here

How Timothy Keller Spreads the Gospel in New York City, and Beyond

There is a great article online about Tim Keller's newest book and his work in NYC. If you are not aware of or had not thought about how challenging it is to do gospel ministry in NYC, read this. It is very cool.

Jonathan Edwards still inspires

Several links here that might inspire you... all related to Jonathan Edwards and his resolutions as a young man. First an article about Edwards and then a bit about the resolutions and then a poster that you can buy if you want to (but it's really expensive cause it's a fundraiser).

An excerpt from the article by Stephen Nichols...

He was a young man unsure of his future. He had many gifts and not a few options before him. His father and grandfather were ministers, as were uncles and others in the family tree. He had a first-rate education, one of the finest of the day, so he was well-prepared for a future in the halls of the academy, should he so choose. He even had a penchant for science and perhaps could have headed off in that direction. But for the time being he was a pastor, a young pastor at that. Eighteen going on nineteen, he found himself far from his native soil of the Connecticut River Valley in the throes of a church split in a Presbyterian church in New York City. He had been invited to pastor the minority faction somewhere along the docks of the city’s harbor. New York City wasn’t nearly as busy in 1722, the year in question, as it is now. The population hovered around just under ten thousand. For a young man from the idyllic setting of small town New England, however, it was a place unlike any he had ever seen.

Amidst all of this uncertainty and flux, this young man, Jonathan Edwards, needed both a place to stand and a compass for some direction. So he took to writing. He kept a diary and he penned some guidelines, which he came to call his “Resolutions.” These resolutions would supply both that place for him to stand and a compass to guide him as he made his way.

Pelagianism and the gospel

At our youth commission training day, I threw out a few terms that I only briefly explained. I thought it would be good to give you more background and detail.

Here it is...

Pelagius was a heretic in the church back around roughly 400 AD. He believed that every person is responsible for their own life. Adam gave us a bad example and Christ gave us a good example, but neither affected us. We choose freely and are judged by our own choices. The impact Pelagius left on the church, besides being noted in history as having been declared a heretic by the Council of Carthage, is that today we use the term “pelagian” to describe the view that we save ourselves. We can see some of this idea when people talk about free will (and mean that we totally control whether or not we get to heaven) or describe Jesus as a great moral example.

Semi-pelagian then is the perspective that we save ourselves with God’s help, or that it is somehow a shared process. This view might suggest that free will means that Jesus’ death on the cross made it possible for me to choose him and decide to be a Christian. Semi-pelagianism is the view of the Roman Catholic Church because they teach that salvation is by grace and man’s good works. This view means that we contribute something to our salvation... namely being good enough to be saved. They do not teach that we are already good enough but through confession and penitence, we work towards salvation.

This contrasts with the quote we put before you.

"The gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God’s help. Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father."
— Michael Horton

We looked at Col 2:6-15 and asked the question... “What part did you contribute?” The answer is nothing, nada, zero, zip! God did it all. This is salvation by grace because grace is unmerited favor. In other words, it is good stuff we get - that we do not in any way deserve.

We did not have time to look at Phil 2:12-13 On that passage, I wanted to point out that our will power is God’s workmanship. Most of the time we notice the idea of working out our salvation but we don’t notice the phrase after it which tells us that it is God’s work not ours. We have to learn to live as people who have been saved already by God’s grace. Which leads us back to the phrase that Thomas Cranmer believed...

“What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” ~ Thomas Cranmer

I don’t recall if I explained fully who Thomas Cranmer was. He was the first Archbishop of Canterbury after the Church of England left the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote our first book of common prayer in 1549 and revised it in 1552 to make it more clearly unlike the Roman Mass. Our BCP comes from his work. However, our BCP has been significantly influenced by Roman Catholic theology and it really is very different from Cranmer’s final work. That is a different topic though.

We talked about the fact that if we want to get rid of sin in our lives, we need to focus our attention on Jesus and put our hearts on him. The more we love God, the more our behavior will change to reflect that. This is good news! Not that we keep making commitments or rededicating our lives but that we seek to fall in love with Jesus every day. This is also humbling news because we recognize that the sin in other people’s lives and the sin in our society is the result of people not knowing the love of God. It’s not that they are bad people and we are not. We are all sinners in need of a savior.

So to sum up things... salvation is totally God’s work. We merely receive the gift through faith, which is a gift in itself. Where does that leave free will then? Simple... free will is generally true of our choices apart from the matter of salvation. Meaning, I choose who I marry, where I got to college, what kind of car I will buy, where I will live, etc etc. Of course we seek God’s direction on all that stuff, but the bottom line is that we can make these choices. We ought to make these based on where we sense that God is pointing us. If we did not have this sort of free will, we would be merely puppets on strings. If you don’t understand that metaphor, sorry.

So, does that shed some more light on things we discussed way back in January?