revelation19:

If you are trusting in anything but Christ for salvation, be it church attendance, time spent in the Word, the amount of people you share the Gospel with, your effort in trying to not sin, or even in your effort to love God, then Christ is nothing to you. If it is by those things that you are saved, then you are obligated to keep the whole law of the Old Testament. In Christ we receive the hope of righteousness because in Him, doing those things means nothing and neither does not doing them. In Christ, faith working through love is all that matters. And that can only come as a result of the Spirit of God working in us. So please, quit trying to be who God already says that you are.

Do I believe that the bible calls us to Holiness?

Absolutely.

Do I believe that He calls us to mission?

Yes, with my whole heart.

Do I believe that in the end, we are to live a certain way, morally?

Yes.

Do I think you better watch what you watch & watch what you listen to & watch what you pump your life full of?

In every way, I do.

Do I believe that ANY of that saves you?

No.

& that distinction is unbelievably important.
Where you fail to make that distinction, you send people back to what Jesus came to destroy. So, may you be better men & women than that. & may you have a better understanding of what the Gospel is. May we come back to, over & over & over again, the atoning work of Christ on the cross.

— Matt Chandler

There must be a better way to fight about the things we can’t seem to agree on. Consider these four ways to fight clean over doctrine.

1. Keep the cross at the center of your theological system.

I have found it impossible to look up to Jesus and then down my nose at a brother or sister with whom I disagree. A cross-centered theology reminds us to keep the “main thing the main thing” and serves as a helpful compass to navigate the landscape of secondary issues. It also helps us see how much we actually share in common and what serves as the source of unity and hope. When the gospel is the center, everything else becomes appropriately resized.

2. Ask yourself some uncomfortable questions.

We all like to assume that we are as cool as ice when the differences come to light, but is this really the case? Ask yourself these questions: What posture do I take in a doctrinal discussion? Do I quickly become agitated? Do I raise my voice easily? How would my wife or those closest to me people describe me during these kinds of situations? Take it a step further and actually ask them. Their answers may surprise you. And help you.

3. Remember that you probably held the other position not too long ago.

Nearly all pastors and theologians I know continually refine their theology. Sure, we may have the “big things” down, but some theological shifting is natural as we learn, grow, and age. For example, if you subscribe to a more Reformed understanding of the “doctrines of grace,” there is a strong chance that you haven’t always stood where you stand now. The way you present your ideas has a lot to do with how they’re received. Don’t be another “angry Calvinist.” We have enough of them.

4. Pursue humility with the same passion that you pursue clarity.

This may be the most difficult but necessary pursuit of all. Never forget that studying comes with a built-in occupational hazard: pride. It is so easy to live on the wrong side of 1 Corinthians 8:1b: “Knowledge puffs up but love builds up.” As we seek to be diligent in out study, we should seek to be equally diligent in our pursuit of humility. To this end, I try to devote myself to prayer, re-reading Philippians 2, and reflecting on Jesus’ finished work on the cross. As we see the great humility of Jesus, the Spirit will cultivate greater humility in us as well.

Father, I thank You for these men and women, some of them good friends of mine, some of them, I’ve never seen before.

I know we come in here tonight as humans.
I know we come in here tonight with some baggage.
I know we come in here tonight, some of us struggling with sin, some of us caught in some pretty dark patterns, some of us would still be religious but don’t have much of a relationship with you.

And we’ll talk about some of these things next week, Father, but I pray that we might hear the good news tonight.

Like earlier in Ephesians, You said that You enlighten the eyes of our hearts to see. And I guess that’s what I’m praying for tonight, that you would enlighten the eyes of hearts to see, because we live in this unbelievably dangerous religiosity that would keep our focus on everything except what actually matters.

And how insane is it that so many of us have these dominant opinions on peripheral ideas and no idea about Your cross and resurrection? So then there is no grace when we discuss these topics, there is no forgiveness, there is no love, just venom.

Help us.
Help Your bride.
Help the church.
Help us as individuals and fill us with Your Spirit’s power.

I pray if there be struggles in this room that we might find ourselves running to You, You whose power courses in our soul, if we’ll just tap into it. We love You. I think it’s most of our confessions that we want to love You more than we do, so help us.

It’s for Your beautiful name I pray. Amen.

    — Matt Chandler, concluding prayer in his sermon “Of First Importance”

John Dink has assembled some excellent quotes on his blog. This one from Robert Capon is one of my all-time favorites.

The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case. (Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three, pg. 114-115)

Reflecting on this quote, John writes, “Sola Gratia, Grace Alone, was not merely a leaning of the Reformation… it was a pillar. The reformers trumpeted God’s grace as the only Christian method, with no compromise. The Gospel was being unleashed again, not reinvented, but rediscovered… the unending love of God, freely given to the undeserving. The truth–so scandalous, so surprising, our hearts have to be sitting down to hear it… God saves sinners single-handedly, He will not be needing our help.

In fact, diluting the Gospel with our own help is precisely why grace ceases to amaze us. So busy trying to help Jesus help us, we hardly ever taste His gift and we remain unchanged and unmoved by it.

Over time, our blended, balanced, watered-down cup of grace leaves us cynical and sober. We want so desperately to mix in some of our rule-keeping or our performance… we’d give anything to add something of our own label! But it never turns out as we had hoped. We start to feel like we can’t keep up our end of the bargain – we feel as though we’ve failed.

But… what if we don’t need our own label? What if Jesus kept up our end of the bargain for us?

Those who are broken and bold enough to ask the questions, find themselves seated at a table with smiling sinners – too drunk on grace to remember the rules, and yet, they all seem to know them by heart. We’re served glass upon glass and something happens… the Gospel becomes the power of God and the wisdom of God. The power of God, because we taste something strong enough to save us. The wisdom of God, because we taste something good enough to change us. The bar is always open and the drinks are all paid for–just thank the Bar Tender, raise your glass and drink it straight. It’s all Grace.”

Are you busy mixing or do you drink grace straight? Are you always in a spiritual hurry or is your soul free to rest and raise a glass? Is it possible that free grace in Christ causes people to love like Christ?

John 1:16-17, Luke 10:38-42, Ezk 36:26-27

Jesus is going to teach about persecution in a way that you don’t hear us teach about persecution. Persecution, suffering for us is something that needs to be solved. But Jesus teaches it a whole other way. In Matthew 5:11-12, He says, “Blessed are you when men persecute you.” He actually goes on to say, “Rejoice and be glad in it.”

Think about that.

So much of our concern today is how to make the message cool and how to not be persecuted for what we believe. We don’t want to be viewed as hyper-spiritual people; we don’t want to be viewed as weirdoes. We want to try to make it cool. We want to give Jesus an extreme home makeover. And Jesus is saying, “No, no, no. Blessed are you when you’re persecuted. Rejoice and be glad. Why? Because great is your reward in Heaven.”

And Paul, on that same thought, is going to tell us in Romans 8 that the sufferings of this present world are not worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed in us. Both men, Jesus and Paul, teaching by the power of the Holy Spirit, are saying something very simple: that in the gospel all suffering, all persecution, is redeemed. So much that on that day, in glory – looking back on persecution, looking back on suffering – we’ll say, “It was worth it. To get this, to get here, it was worth it.”

     - Matt Chandler, A Forgetfulness That Leads To Foolishness