What is an Idol?

From Tim Keller’s Counterfeit Gods:

What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living. An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought. It can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even success in the Christian ministry. When your meaning in life is to fix someone else’s life, we may call it “codependency” but it is really idolatry. An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.”

Filed under: Discernment, Discipleship, God centredness, Gospel-centred, Idolatry, Jesus Christ, Salvation, Sanctification, The Christian Life, Tim Keller

Can’t Worship?

My thanks to Rick Ianniello for this. I can’t believe we still have to say this. It’s so basic it hurts!

This is excellent from Tim Hughes …

“The church that can’t worship must be entertained. And men who can’t lead a church to worship must provide the entertainment.” A.W. Tozer.

This is quite a challenge – especially as we all prepare to lead worship this Sunday. Are we going to pull out the classics, and try and force people into a time of worship? Are we going to rely on our own strength to make something happen? Or, are we going trust and follow God to lead us in a beautiful, deep and meaningful encounter of worship.

John 6:63
“The Spirit brings life; the flesh counts for nothing.”

Perhaps the best thing we could do in terms of our preparation for leading worship is to spend some time in God’s presence, seeking Him and asking that He may fill us up with the Holy Spirit and use us in power to bring glory to Him.

Let’s go for it. Who wants shallow entertainment when we can give people Jesus!

Filed under: AW Tozer, Discernment, Evangelical, Worship

The Postmodern Zone

(HT: Reformed Voices)

Filed under: Discernment, Emerging Church, Truth

Counsel from the Cross

I can’t recommend this book highly enough – here’s a good review by Ron Reffett of Books that Matter:

Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson have written one of the most gospel centered books on counseling that I have ever seen. It’s not another 12 steps to your best life or self help disguised in a “christian” wrapper, Counsel From The Cross is a practical “how to” in applying the gospel not only in your life but also in other people’s life. I loved the quote from B.B. Warfield that starts the introduction, ” There is nothing in us or done by us, at any stage of our earthly development, because of which we are acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all….This is not true of us only when we believe. It is just as true after we have believed. It will continue to be true as long as we live. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behavior may be. It is always on His “blood and righteousness” alone that we can rest.” Great way to begin a book on counseling, we are nothing and have nothing outside of Christ. We are utterly without any hope whatsoever without Jesus and His righteousness, our righteousness is but filthy rags.
This book is broken into nine different chapters, starting with how do we see ourselves and moving from that into how do we see our Savior and His love toward us in light of the tremendous bad news about our sin riddled state. Fitzpatrick and Johnson have done a wonderful job of breaking this book into manageable size chunks, with great questions to apply what you’ve read and also to dig a little further into counseling from the cross.
In the second appendix there is a wonderful resource taken from Jay Adam’s Christian Counselor’s New Testamant, it is an excellent way of applying the gospel to pretty much any difficulty that you or someone you know may be experiencing, the list is by no means exhaustive but would be helpful as a guide as to where to begin in applying Scripture and the gospel to a wide array of circumstances and situations that you may find yourself faced with.
There were many nuggets of goodness to take from this book and I’m sure upon multiple readings, many other things will come to the surface, here is one example of those nuggets;
“The good news also tells us that although we were rebels, he made us his own (Phil. 3:12) He loves us. We are not outcasts, house guests, foster children, slaves or strangers Like an attentive Father, he has yearned over us (Jer 31:20) and chosen us before the foundation of the world, and he has brought us into his family as his beloved adopted children (Eph 1:4) We’ve been born “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:13)
What a wonderful picture of the gospel! We have not slipped into the family of God by accident or as Fitzpatrick states “by the skin of our teeth” we were chosen before the foundation of the world at just the right time God sent forth His Son and there is not one thing within any of us to make God love us any more than He already does. The wonderful good news is that even though we are filthy undeserving sinners, we are invited actually called into an intimate relationship with God the Father through the finished work of the Son and sealed by the precious Holy Spirit! We are far better off than we deserve!
You really need to pick up a copy of Counsel From The Cross, it is a cross centered work that would benefit your soul greatly. The problem isn’t that we need more steps to arrive at a place of imperfection, we need to be faced with the horribly bad news of our sorry state and then be affected daily by the incredible good news of the gospel, and that is we are indeed far worse off than we realize but we are loved far more than we will ever know.

Filed under: Books, Christ-centred, Discernment, Discipleship, Doctrine, Evangelical, Gospel-centred, Sanctification, The Christian Life, The Cross

Piper: Why I Don’t Have a Television and Rarely Go to Movies

I find John Piper’s rationale compelling. I also appreciate his humility:

Now that the video of the Q&A at Advance 09 is available, I can look at it and feel bad all over again. Here’s what I regret, indeed what I have apologized for to the person who asked the question.

The first question to me and Mark Driscoll was, “Piper says get rid of my TV, and Driscoll says buy extra DVRs. How do you reconcile this difference?”

I responded, “Get your sources right. . . . I never said that in my life.”

Almost as soon as it was out of my mouth, I felt: “What a jerk, Piper!” A jerk is a person who nitpicks about the way a question is worded rather than taking the opportunity to address the issue in a serious way. I blew it at multiple levels.

So I was very glad when the person who asked the question wrote to me. I wrote back,

Be totally relieved that YOU did not ask a bad question. I gave a useless and unhelpful, and I think snide, answer and missed a GOLDEN opportunity to make plain the dangers of the triviality you referred to. . . . I don’t know why I snapped about the wording of the question instead of using it for what it was intended for. It was foolish and I think sinful.

So let me see if I can do better now. I can’t give an answer for what Mark means by “buy extra DVDs,” but I can tell you why my advice sounds different. I suspect that Mark and I would not agree on the degree to which the average pastor needs to be movie-savvy in order to be relevant, and the degree to which we should expose ourselves to the world’s entertainment.

I think relevance in preaching hangs very little on watching movies, and I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. Sources of spiritual power—which are what we desperately need—are not in the cinema. You will not want your biographer to write: Prick him and he bleeds movies.

If you want to be relevant, say, for prostitutes, don’t watch a movie with a lot of tumbles in a brothel. Immerse yourself in the gospel, which is tailor-made for prostitutes; then watch Jesus deal with them in the Bible; then go find a prostitute and talk to her. Listen to her, not the movie. Being entertained by sin does not increase compassion for sinners.

There are, perhaps, a few extraordinary men who can watch action-packed, suspenseful, sexually explicit films and come away more godly. But there are not many. And I am certainly not one of them.

I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.

I’ll put it bluntly. The only nude female body a guy should ever lay his eyes on is his wife’s. The few exceptions include doctors, morticians, and fathers changing diapers. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). What the eyes see really matters. “Everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Better to gouge your eye than go to hell (verse 29).

Brothers, that is serious. Really serious. Jesus is violent about this. What we do with our eyes can damn us. One reason is that it is virtually impossible to transition from being entertained by nudity to an act of “beholding the glory of the Lord.” But this means the entire Christian life is threatened by the deadening effects of sexual titillation.

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. There is not one man in a thousand whose spiritual eyes are more readily moved by the beauty of Christ because he has just seen a bare breast with his buddies.

But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television. So we have never had a TV in 40 years of marriage (except in Germany, to help learn the language). I don’t regret it.

Sorry again, for the bad answer. I hope this helps.

Pastor John

Filed under: Attributes of God, Christ-centred, Discernment, Discipleship, Evangelical, God's worthiness, Jesus Christ, John Piper, Renewing the Mind, Sanctification, The Christian Life, The Church, Worldliness

10 reasons churches stall

These are the openning lines of each point from Marcus Honeysett’s excellent article. I recommend you read the whole thing here, and here.

1. The church forgets who we are and what we are for. 1 Peter says that we are a royal priesthood (who we are) for declaring God’s greatnesses to the world (what we are for)…

2. The majority of believers are no longer thrilled with the Lord and what He is doing in their lives. When questions like “what is God doing with you at the moment” cease to be common currency it is sure sign of creeping spiritual mediocrity. When a large percentage of believers are spiritually stalled, the church stalls too…

3. The people get happy with not going anywhere because of the comfort and refreshments on offer. Worse still when people get happy with activities, events, service and even good teaching and preaching but are resistant to challenges to radical living and sacrifice for the gospel…

4. When filler-Christians who have no real commitment to gospel vision out number the core of committed believers who do…

5. When a large percentage of the church are used to being passive receivers of ministry from other people rather than being active self-feeders on the Word of God…

6. No life application from the Bible. When preaching, teaching and Bible study become ends in themselves rather than means to an end, something is badly wrong. The aim of no passage of scripture is that we should simply know what it says without the knowledge translating into discipleship and worship…

7. A church becomes afraid to ask radical questions. Perhaps a pastor knows that things are foundationally wrong but knows he will be severely resisted (or sacked) if he raises the issue…

8. Confusing Christian activities with discipleship. The myriad of opportunities within and without the local church to spend time doing churchy things makes it very easy to believe that doing those activities automatically means we are growing as disciples…

9. Not understanding how to release and encourage everyone in the church to use their spiritual gifts for the building up of the church. This stall can take several different forms: the church (or the leader) that expects the leader to do everything and everyone else to do nothing…

10. Moving into maintenance mode. At some point all churches take decisions that tend towards stalling. No church was stalled at the point that it was founded. At the beginning all churches were adventures in faith and daring risk for God. No one actively decided for comfort over risk, but at some point the mindset shifted from uncomfortable faith and daring passion for the Lord to comfortable mediocrity…

Filed under: Christ our treasure, Christianity, Church, Discernment, Discipleship, Doctrine, The Christian Life, The Church, The Gospel, The word of God

Hug me, I’m a false apostle

We cannot simply assume that we have the gospel. Unless we keep the gospel at the center of the church, we are always in danger of shoving it off to one side and letting something else take its place.

Martin Luther rightly warned that “there is a clear and present danger that the devil may take away from us the pure doctrine of faith and may substitute for it the doctrines of works and of human traditions…” The good news of the cross and resurrection must be preached, believed, and lived. Otherwise it will be lost.

The church’s greatest danger is not the anti-gospel outside the church; it is the counterfeit gospel inside the church. The Judaizers did not walk around Pisidian Antioch wearing T-shirts that said, “Hug me, I’m a false apostle.

What made them so dangerous was that they knew how to talk the way that Christians talk. They used all the right terminology. They talked about how they “got saved.” They told people to “trust in Christ.” They “presented the gospel.” Only they did not have the gospel after all.

We should expect, therefore, that the most serious threat to the one true gospel is something that is also called the gospel. The most dangerous teachers are the ones who preach a different Christ but still call him “Jesus.”

Philip Ryken, Reformed Expository Commentary, Galatians, p. 21

(HT: Martin Downes)

Filed under: Christ-centred, Discernment, Doctrine, Evangelical, Heresy, Jesus Christ, The Bible, The Gospel

DeYoung and Kluck on the Church

Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck write as guest columnists today in the Newsweek/Washington Post forum on religion. Here’s an excerpt:

Perhaps Christians are leaving the church because it isn’t tolerant and open-minded. But perhaps the church-leavers have their own intolerance too–intolerant of tradition, intolerant of authority, intolerant of imperfection except their own. Are you open-minded enough to give the church a chance–a chance for the church to be the church, not a coffee shop, not a mall, not a variety show, not Chuck E. Cheese, not a U2 concert, not a nature walk, but a wonderfully ordinary, blood-bought, Spirit-driven church with pastors, sermons, budgets, hymns, bad carpet and worse coffee?

Their book Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion is now available.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Filed under: Church, Culture, Discernment, Doctrine, Emerging Church, Evangelical, Jesus Christ, The Bible, The Church

Treasuring Christ above all things

Filed under: Christ our treasure, Christ-centred, Dead to self, Discernment, Doctrine, Holiness, Jesus Christ, John Piper, Salvation, Sanctification, Spiritual Warfare, The Christian Life, The word of God, Worldliness, Zeal

Beware of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

From my experience this is true of Christian youth culture in Europe, but not in Africa and Asia.  My thanks to Jason Robertson for this:

Dr. Albert Mohler reports that when Christian Smith and his fellow researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took a close look at the religious beliefs held by American teenagers, they found that the faith held and described by most adolescents came down to something the researchers identified as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

Therapeutic Deism consists of beliefs like these:

1. “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.”
2. “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.”
3. “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”
4. “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.”
5. “Good people go to heaven when they die.”

Notice that the belief system of these youth is very inconsistent.  It is a muddled mixture of both moralism and hedonism.  In short, they are creating a god in their own image, according to their own pleasures.  They want a Divine parent… who will provide for them so they can have fun.

By the way, #3 reveales that “goodness” is completely subjective.  In other words, the god that these young people believes exists is not the righteous God of the Bible but the god of their own imaginations.

I encourage you to read the whole article.

Filed under: Christianity, Culture, Discernment, Moralism, The Christian Life, The Church, Youth

How Do You Break Free from an Addiction to Entertainment?

John Piper answers this question, writing that “Recognizing [the problem] is a huge step in the right direction” and that ” ultimately it’s a gift of grace to feel the glory of God.” Here are some suggestions of what you should do:

1. Seek the Lord earnestly about it. Pray like crazy that God would open your eyes to see wondrous things out of his law.

2. Immerse yourself in the Bible, even when you don’t feel like it, pleading with God to open your eyes to see what’s really there.

3. Get in a group where you talk about serious things.

4. Begin to share your faith. One of the reasons we are not as moved by our own faith as we are is because we almost never talk about it to any unbeliever. It starts to feel like a kind of hothouse thing, and then it starts to have a feeling of unreality about it. And then the powers of entertainment have more sway in our life.

5. . . . [T]hink about your death. Think about your death a lot. Ask what you’d like to be doing in the season of life, or hours or days, leading up to meeting Christ. I do that a lot these days. I think about the impact of death, and what I would like to be found doing, and how I would prepare to meet him and give an account to him.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Filed under: Biblical disciplines, Death, Discernment, Discipleship, Evangelical, God centredness, Jesus Christ, John Piper, The Bible, The Gospel

3 questions with Tim Keller

By Garrett E. Wishall

Tim Keller serves as senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, N.Y.

Question: What do pastors need to be doing to lead their flock out of idolatry and into Christlikeness?

Tim Keller: The subject of idolatry is a lot more nuanced and complex than I could possibly get across in my talk at the Gospel Coalition conference. I made an allusion to the fact that idolatry sometimes is talked about in the Bible under the heading of spiritual adultery. It is also sometimes talked about under the heading of spiritual mastery and slavery. When Paul talks about those who are slaves to sin: all of those categories are actually talking about idolatry.

Most preachers feel like “If I’m going to preach about idols, I have to tell people what an idol is.” What they don’t have in mind is: idolatry is at the root of all of our psychological problems, moral problems, cultural issues, our political problems. It is such a pervasive category in the bible. For example, at the end of 1 John 5, even though idols have not been listed — he has been saying, “Walk in holiness,” “Walk in the light,” “Walk in love,” “Walk in truth,” — at the very end he says, “Keep yourself from idols.” The word idolatry isn’t anywhere in there before the last verse. What that means is, we don’t think deeply enough. We just look at the behavioral level and say “Stop doing this, start doing this,” and we don’t realize that there is an idolatrous reason behind each behavioral issue. For example, behind the belief that women should be ordained is the need for power and a love for feeling in charge.

To get a grasp on the pervasiveness of idolatry, I would say the first thing you would need to do is that you need to get a better grip on the subject. Most of the Christian Counseling Education Foundation (CCEF) stuff on changing, talks about idolatry, particularly about psychological idols. You could read a politically liberal Christian or a political conservative to understand what’s going on in culture. There are a whole lot of other books that are now being produced on the idea of idolatry in the church…and I think what a minister needs to do is get that into their bloodstream so they are always preaching with idolatry in mind. I think you have to understand the concept pretty deeply and then it will influence the way in which you preach and the way in which you pastor.

Q: What safeguards should 20-something pastors have in place to avoid the idolatry of ministry fame and the attitude of big numbers equals success?

TK: If you know it is a danger, that is a very important start. Additionally, when you find yourself unusually discouraged because things aren’t growing or people aren’t listening to you — you have to catch yourself. You have to realize “This is an inordinate amount of discouragement, which reveals the idolatry of justification by ministry.” Meaning, you say you believe in justification by grace, but you feel like and are acting like you believe in justification by ministry. You have to recognize you are making something of an idol out of ministry. When you do experience inordinate discouragement because things aren’t going well, you need to say, “It’s okay to be discouraged but not to be this discouraged. This is discouragement that leads to idolatry,” and you repent.

Additionally, idols create a fantasy world. You may think that you are just thinking about ministry strategy, but it could be you’re fantasizing about success. So be careful about doing too much daydreaming about success, what you would like to see happen. Because it’s really a kind of pornography. You’re actually thinking about a beautiful church and people acclaiming you: be careful about fantasizing too much about ministry success and dreaming about it and thinking about what it’s going to look like.

Q: What are your favorite and least favorite elements of New York city?

TK: New York city is the greatest place to live. As my wife would say, there would be no better place to live in the whole world as long as you have someone following behind you with a wheelbarrow full of money. What I like about it is its diversity and vitality, but what I don’t like, frankly, is how expensive it is.

(Via Justin Taylor)

Filed under: Culture, Discernment, Discipleship, Doctrine, Evangelical, Idolatry, Renewing the Mind, Repentance, Spirit of the age, The Christian Life, Tim Keller

Satan does not mind family values and social justice as long as …

From Tim Chester:

Here’s a helpful quote from Russell Moore (via Justin Taylor) reflecting on Satan’s third temptation of Jesus:

Satan ultimately has a power that is not found most importantly in moral decay or in cultural chaos. His power is in the authority to accuse. The power of accusation. The power of holding humanity captive through the fear of death and the certainty of judgment …

Satan is not fearful of external conformity to rule. Not even to the external conformity of the rule of Christ – provided there is no cross. Satan does not mind family values – as long as what you ultimately value is the family. Satan does not mind social justice – as long as you see justice as most importantly social. Satan does not tremble at a Christian worldview. He will let you have a Christian worldview as long as your ultimate goal is viewing the world …

He will let you get what it is that you want, no matter what it is – sanctity of marriage, environmental protection, orphan care, all of these good and wonderful things – he will allow you to gain those things provided you do not preach and proclaim and live through the power of a cross that cancels his power of condemnation.

Filed under: Discernment, Gospel-centred, Jesus Christ, Redemption, Satan, Substitutionary Atonement, The Christian Life, The Cross, The Gospel, The word of God

Tim Keller on Religious Idols

From Josh Harris:

[In] his message at The Gospel Coalition, Tim Keller talked about the importance of confronting idols in preaching the gospel. He taught that idolatry is anything I look at and say, “If I have that, my life has value.” Idolatry is making a good thing an ultimate thing. Keller described three categories of idols: personal, religious and cultural.

I thought his description of religious idols was particularly compelling. He said that those who worship religious idols think they are devoted to God, but they’re not. He then described three potential religious idols:

Truth can be made an idol. Are you resting in the rightness of your doctrine rather than the work of Jesus? If so, the Bible calls you a fool. In Proverbs, “the scoffer” is a person like this. The scoffer is always sure he is right, and always disrespectful, disdainful, and mocking toward his opponents. The internet breeds scoffers, because if you’re a scoffer you get more traffic to your blog.

Gifts can be an idol. You can mistake spiritual gifts for spiritual fruit. Especially if you are successful in ministry, you can begin believing in justification by ministry: “I know I’m in God’s will because my ministry is going well.” Many of us in the Reformed world make an idol out of being a great preacher: “If I could just be a great preacher, then my life would have significance.”

Morality can be a religious idol. Holiness is good, but Christians can feel like God loves them and will bless them because of their moral record.

Ultimately none of our false gods ever deliver. They always let us down. Our hope has to be in Jesus Christ who died for our sins, paid our penalty and overthrew the principalities and powers of this world.

Read a complete outline of Keller’s talk courtesy of The Resurgence.

Filed under: Christ our righteousness, Discernment, Discipleship, Doctrine, Evangelical, Holiness, Idolatry, Jesus Christ, Sanctification, The Christian Life, The Gospel, Tim Keller

Gladness in the Gospel

“Truth will readily be exchanged for error when no more sweetness and joy is to be found in it than is to be found in error. When we find any of the good truths of the gospel coming home to our souls with power, giving us gladness of heart and transforming us into the image and likeness of it, the Holy Spirit is then at his work. He is pouring out his oil.”

- John Owen, Communion with God, abridged by R.J.K. Law (Carlisle, Pa.: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), 189.

(HT: Of First Importance)

Filed under: Christ-centred, Discernment, Discipleship, Doctrine, Evangelical, Gospel-centred, Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, John Owen, Puritans, Sanctification, The Christian Life, The Gospel