“…The twentieth century, the bloodiest in human history, exhibited spectacular instances of intolerance – and the most violent exemplars had very little to do with religion.  Of course, there was at least a religious component in the strife in the Balkans and again in the bloody violence between Tutsis and Hutus.  Yet most observers recognized that even here the more important factors were tribalism, racism, perceived economic injustice, very different interpretations of history, and ‘honor’ and vengeance killings that escalated to the scale of genocide.”

“Few religious factors played much part in the largest of the slaughters of the twentieth century, the violence espoused by Fascism and Communism.  Perhaps fifty million Chinese died under Mao, about twenty million Ukrainians under Stalin, and then we come to World War II and the Holocaust.  In both its Russian and its Chinese forms, Fascism was nominally Christian but only in the sense that it was happy to appeal to God and religion in pursuit of its own social and political agendas, never so as to be reformed by Scripture or Christian truth or morality, never in any sense to belong to the great tradition of historic creeds.”

“Despite the best efforts of Jonathan I. Israel not only to ground the Enlightenment in the thought of Spinoza but also to demonstrate that only atheism provides adequate resources to generate toleration – in his analysis, theism and religious belief in all their forms are intrinsically intolerant – the outcome in the twentieth century is scarcely reassuring.  Atheism, whether theoretical (as in Communism) or practical (as in Fascism), far from being tolerant, spilled oceans of blood.”

Don Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance, p. 72-3.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

You may well have heard of the collapse of the Bolton midfielder Fabrice Muamba during an FA-cup match against Spurs on Saturday. To see anyone become so ill is shocking. The fact that he is only 23 years old only adds to the upset. After being critically ill it appears that Fabrice Muamba is beginning a slow road to recovery. On Sunday Gary Cahill scored in Chelsea’s match against Leicester City. During his celebration he lifted his top to reveal a t-shirt with ‘Pray 4 Muamba’ on it. Tabloid newspapers have spoken of God being in control and have encouraged people to pray.

I spotted this article on the BBC News website this week by Mark Easton. It suggests that in the times of crisis and unpredictability we look ‘to the heavens for meaning and hope’. His article goes on to look at ‘evidence’ to whether prayer actually works. Apparently studies have shown prayer to have a beneficial effect on plants and a therepeutic effect on patients in a coronary care unit as well as making you a more cooperative and friendly person. However, I think the article and it’s conclusion that ’prayer is a straightforward way for an individual to focus the mind on their capacity to think nice thoughts’ and ‘anyone can close their eyes and make a wish that bad things do not happen’ misses the point. Prayer is not focusing your mind on nice thoughts nor wishing bad things not to happen.

Don Carson, in his book ‘A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and his Prayers‘, explains that prayer is ’one of the foundational steps in knowing God, and one of the basic demonstrations that we do know God‘ (Carson, Call to, p16). When Jesus’ disciples ask him, in Luke chapter 11 verse 1 ‘Lord teach us to pray’ Jesus invites them to begin their prayer with ‘Father, hallowed be your name. In Matthew’s gospel chapter 6 verse 9 Jesus tells his disciples to ‘pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

Prayer comes from God knowing us and us knowing God. How else could we ever address God as ‘Father’? In our natural state we are as far from God as we could be. Through sin we are God’s enemies and thus ‘by nature children of wrath’ (Ephesians 2:3). As we look toward Easter, to the death and resurrection of Jesus, what comes into focus is the extraordinary grace of God. Through the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross, we are forgiven. Christ takes our sin upon himself so that we might have Jesus right standing with God. Through Christ we are adopted and become children of God. ‘To all who receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to be children of God’ (John 1:12). The fact we can address our prayers to Our Father is a wonderful outworking of this truth.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

Romans 8:14-17

“…We live in a culture in which many other and complementary truths about God are widely disbelieved.  I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God – to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.”

“The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable.  The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized.  This process has been going on for some time.  My generation was taught to sing, ‘What the world needs now is love, sweet love,” in which we robustly instruct the Almighty that we do not need another mountain (we have enough of them), but we could do with some more love.  The hubris is staggering.”

“It has not always been so.  In generations when almost everyone believed in the justice of God, people sometimes found it difficult to believe in the love of God.  The preaching of the love of God came as wonderful good news.  Nowadays if you tell people that God loves them, they are unlikely to be surprised.  Of course God loves me; he’s like that, isn’t he?  Besides, why shouldn’t he love me?  I’m kind of cute, or at least as nice as the next person.  I’m okay, you’re okay, and God loves you and me.”

“Even in the mid-1980s, according to Andrew Greeley, three-quarters of his respondents in an important poll reported they preferred to think of God as ‘friend’ than as ‘king.’  I wonder what the percentage would have been if the option had been ‘friend’ or ‘judge.’  Today most people seem to have little difficulty believing in the love of God; they have far more difficulty believing in the justice of God, the wrath of God, and the noncontradictory truthfulness of an omniscient God.  But is the biblical teaching on the love of God maintaining its shape when the meaning of ‘God’ dissolves in mist? (p. 11-12).”

Carson is dead on; the quote is worth reading a few times.  It also makes me think once again of the pulpit.  If a preacher never mentions the holiness, wrath, and justice of God in more than a cursory way, is his emphasis on God’s love even a biblical one?  Or, to move the discussion to the pew, if a person is never pointedly confronted with God’s righteous wrath against sin and the sinner, does he really know what God’s love is?  This is one reason we need a biblical balance in our preaching, teaching, learning, and our faith.  If we emphasize God’s love at the expense of his justice, holiness, and wrath, the love of God becomes as mushy as a line in a Hallmark card.  And though that kind of love can make a person feel good, it cannot save a wicked sinner from everlasting misery.

Get this book: The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by D. A. Carson.

shane lems

This is the inaugural “Saturday Six-Pack” post, an effort to share some of the best things I’ve read online from the past week or so.  Typically, these articles will be faith-focused or ministry-geared, but I reserve the right to live up to the “disorderly pile of who-knows-what” tagline at the top of this page!

In this edition:

1) Destruction: God’s Alien Work
Lisa Dye contributes this Lent devotional, focusing on the wrecking role of God’s work in our lives at times.  Creator?  Certainly.  Provider?  Sure.  Demolition foreman?  Sometimes.

2) Nostalgia: The Enemy of Faith
It’s one thing to value our past, in which we idealize memories and idolize heroes.  But Collin Hansen pushes us to take another look for the warts.  As an example, he provides this look at two recently released books, among the first scholarly treatments of great 20th-century evangelical leaders John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, wildly inspiring while being as imperfect as any of us.

3) The Intolerance of Tolerance
Is the tolerance that our society so values all that it’s cracked up to be?  Don Carson doesn’t think so.

4) How Do You Disciple New Believers?
For all the things involved in helping new Christians grow, Justin Buzzard says that we must get this part clear: “Discipleship is truth transferred through relationship.”

5) The State of the Church in Canada
The Gospel Coalition is holding a Canada Conference on this topic in late May.  While the event is being held nowhere near my home, this post contains information that will interest anyone working or worshiping in Canadian churches.

6) What People Gave Up for Lent 2012
Christianity Today offers this intriguing peek into this year’s Lent-related habits of Christians through some serious Twitter observation.  Somewhat serious, somewhat sarcastic, this short piece will cause a few smiles and a few shocks.

Have a great weekend, friends–renew yourself and reverence God.

The Problem: Assuming the Gospel

Perhaps more common today is the tendency to assume the gospel…while all our creativity, energy and passion is given to other issues. Marriage. Happiness. Prosperity. Evangelism. The poor. Wrestling with Islam. Bioethics. Pressures of Secularization. Dangers on the left. Dangers on the right. The list is endless.

Why Is Assuming so Catastrophic?

Our hearers are inevitably drawn to that about which we are most passionate. Every teacher [or preacher] knows that. My students are unlikely to learn all that I teach them…they are most likely to learn what I am excited about.

If the gospel is merely assumed while relatively peripheral issues ignite our passion, we will train a new generation to downplay the gospel and focus on the peripheral.

The Solution: Be Prophetic From the Center

It is easy to sound prophetic from the margins. What is urgently needed is to be prophetic from the center…Moreover, if in fact we do focus on the gospel and understand it a right, we shall soon see how this gospel, rightly understood, directs us how to think about and what to do about a vast array of other kinds of issues.

I read an interesting book this week titled, “The pastor as scholar and the scholar as pastor”. It’s co-authored by John Piper and Don Carson. The book has grown out of a conference on the subject many years ago held in Chicago. It’s broken up into two parts and written as a testimonial and personal reflection on the topic from the two authors. It particularly interests me because of the current emphasis on pragmatics in pastoral leadership and the de-emphasizing of the theological and scholarly responsibility of the pastor. This book responds to this issue.

quote of the week

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, you’ve never been in a tent with a mosquito.” Unknown

moment of the week

My wife and I deciding to embrace a radical relocation that would ensure we would save a lot of money so we can purchase our own property in 12 months time. Eyes on the goal.

news of the week

Special guest speaker Sy Rogers confirmed to speak at Activate Church Friday 30th march to Sunday 1st April. Very excited.

Books I’ve read this year (most were very good, but the ones that particularly stood out are highlighted in bold):

Living For God’s Glory – Joel Beeke
The Heart of Christianity – Marcus Borg (not recommended)
The Discipline of Grace – Jerry Bridges
The Pursuit of Holiness – Jerry Bridges
The Pilgirm’s Progress – John Bunyan
Uncovered: True Stories of Changed Lives – Jonathan Carswell
Things God Wants Us To Know – Roger Carswell
Reasonable Faith – William Lane Craig (very good, but hard work)
Judges – Dale Ralph Davis
The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins (weirdly this helped reassure me of God’s existence at a time when I was having doubts)
Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God – Jonathan Edwards
The Air I Breathe – Louie Giglio
The Grace Outpouring – Roy Godwin (interesting, I’d like to go and see it for myself)
Stop Dating The Church – Josh Harris
10 Second Sermons – Milton Jones (yes, the guy off of Mock The Week)
Counterfeit Gods – Tim Keller
Generous Justice – Tim Keller
King’s Cross – Tim Keller
The Prodigal God – Tim Keller
Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Servant Leadership For Slow Learners – David Lundy
Christ Our Mediator – C.J. Mahaney
The Cross Centred Life – C.J. Mahaney
Humility: True Greatness – C.J. Mahaney
The Hidden Life of Prayer – David McIntyre
The Mortification of Sin – John Owen
Battling Unbelief – John Piper
The Dangerous Duty of Delight – John Piper (if the thickness of Desiring God is too daunting, try this mini-version)
Desiring God – John Piper (see my review here)
Don’t Waste Your Life – John Piper
God Is The Gospel – John Piper (I started this one in 2010)
When I Don’t Desire God – John Piper
Real Success and How To Achieve It – David Short
The Holiness of God – R.C. Sproul
Discovering The Power of The Cross of Christ – C.H. Spurgeon
The Case For Christ – Lee Strobel
Republocrat – Carl Trueman
Walking Away From Faith – Ruth Tucker (helped me out of my summer of Cartesian doubt)
The Bourne Legacy – Eric Van Lustbader
The Bourne Deception – Eric Van Lustbader
The Dark Side of Christian Cousnselling – Dr E.S. Williams

Books I’m currently part way through:

The Cost of Discipleship – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Gagging of God – Don Carson (very good, but hard work)
Bible Doctrine – Wayne Grudem

Books on my shelf, waiting to be read:

Journal Keeping: Writing For Spiritual Growth – Luann Budd
How Long, O Lord? – Don Carson
Joshua – Dale Ralph Davis
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Nature of True Virtue – Jonathan Edwards
Religious Affections – Jonathan Edwards
The Rage Against God – Peter Hitchens
Ministries of Mercy – Tim Keller
Smart Faith: Loving God With All Your Mind – J.P. Moreland
Think – John Piper

…

Have you read any particularly good books this year that I should add to my wishlist?

Exhausted by despair’s fatigue, I slept
The torment of the God-forsaken dead.
I tossed and turned, or when I woke, I wept,
Until an angel stilled my fears, and said:

“Abandon doubt, and take this quiet boast:
The child she bears is by the Holy Ghost.”

– D.A. Carson, ‘Eleven’ in Holy Sonnets of the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids/Nottingham: Baker/Crossway, 1994), 27.

In this video (yes, that’s spittle dribbling down my chin–look at that library!!), Dr. McGrath discusses the significance of Adam and Eve for theology and takes a more Barthian approach to seeing Adam as theologically significant, but not necessarily historical. This isn’t surprising as Dr. McGrath also holds to theistic evolution, and is an admirer of Thomas Torrance, a well-known Barthian who wrote much on science and theology.

Without wanting to sound presumptuous–who am I to take issue with Alister McGrath???–it strikes me that when he draws the parallel between Adam and Christ there is an incongruity. If Christ is an historical person, as McGrath would affirm, and he undoes the work of Adam, as McGrath said, how can it be that Adam didn’t exist? Everything in the story of redemption is historical but Adam, which hardly seems to make sense. John Piper, at the end of this video, makes the same point. An historical Christ, an historical redemption, requires an historical Adam and an historical Fall.

For a more thorough exegetical treatment that supports Piper’s view, see Don Carson’s essay “Adam in the Epistles of Paul.”

Our time in Scripture has challenged many in our church. Just the other day, I had one individual say to me, this has been one of the most difficult series to listen too. The question that came after this statement was, “Why is it so easy to drift and so hard to grow?”

Don Carson answers this question in his fine book For the Love of God about how spiritual growth happens:

One of the most striking evidences of sinful human nature lies in the universal propensity for downward drift.

In other words, it takes thought, resolve, energy, and effort to bring about reform. In the grace of God, sometimes human beings display such virtues. But where such virtues are absent, the drift is invariably toward compromise, comfort, indiscipline, sliding disobedience and decay that advances, sometimes at a crawl and sometimes at a gallop, across generations.

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, and obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith.

We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated (p. 23).

One sentence in particular struck me; “People do not drift toward holiness.” When we drift, we always drift downward. If we “go with the flow,” we are not likely to be happy where we end up.

Let all those members in our church and those who have committed their life to Christ pay attention to these words. If you don’t like what your life has become, ask God for the grace to make a new beginning. But be forewarned. Drifting is easier, more convenient, and more fun in the short term. Drifting takes no effort. You just relax and go wherever the current takes you.

Spiritual growth comes through “grace-driven effort.” Pray for the grace and then make the effort. As long as you keep drifting, nothing will ever change.  If God is not present, true holiness cannot be present either. We are required to rely on God and put every effort into striving for holiness, for when we do, we begin to understand what it means to live a Holy Life!

“…Democracy, as a valuable form of government as it can be, must never be confused with the Christian vision of the good….  [A] democratic culture cannot be aligned isomorphically with a Christian culture.  Christians will cheer on democracy, believing that, by and large, it benefits the greatest number of people, provides mechanisms for limiting human power (and for ensuring that power can change hands without bloodshed), and usually provides more freedoms than other forms of government.  These freedoms almost inevitably allow many things to foster (I almost wrote ‘fester’) that Christians will dislike, but the same freedoms protect freedom of worship, freedom to bear witness, freedom to change one’s faith without government reprisals, and much more.  Nevertheless, all notions of freedom invoke, implicitly or explicitly, subsidiary notions of freedom from and freedom to or for.”

“The democratic tradition in the West has fostered a great deal of freedom from Scripture, God, tradition, and assorted moral constraints; it encourages freedom toward doing your own thing, hedonism, self-centeredness, and consumerism.  By contrast, the Bible encourages freedom from self-centeredness, idolatry, greed, and all sin and freedom toward living our lives as those who bear God’s image and who have been transformed by his grace, such that our greatest joy becomes doing his will.”

I appreciate how Carson notes that though democracy has its benefits, there still is a relatively sharp clash between Christianity and democracy (especially democracy as it has morphed in the West).  We can be thankful for democracy.  However, we have to always resist the democratization of Christianity and the church.

The above quote was taken from pages 138-9 of Christ and Culture Revisited by D. A. Carson.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

To support the importance of thinking like Christians I use the first three questions and answers of the Westminster Short Catechism:

Question 1: What is the chief end of man?
Answer 1: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.

Q2: What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him?
A2: The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him.

Q3: What do the Scriptures principally teach?
A3: The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.

Working backwards, what we “believe” is not only saving faith, which is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8-9), but the content we build upon that gift. If you will, it is what we recite in the Ecumenical Creeds, Nicene and Apostles, among others. Bundled up in that ‘belief’ is thought. And going further, really, further back…If one of the ways that the Scriptures teach us how to glorify God is in what we believe, then how we think must, of necessity, be bound up in there as well. To meet our chief end, our primary purpose, we must think, and think well. Hence, we must think like Christians, to be able to understand that which presents itself before us, to the glory of God.

Of late I have been reading a ‘little book’ (small in size, big in ideas) written chiefly by John Piper and Don Carson, The Pastor as Scholar & The Scholar as Pastor (© 2011 by Desiring God Foundation and Don Carson, published by Crossway Books). Yesterday I had one of those “What he said” moments, reading Carson’s portion:

We should not proceed much farther without some brief reflections on one frequently abused text that is often applied to our topic. There is an evangelical tradition that treats what Jesus calls the “greatest” or “first” commandment as authorization for all Christian intellectual endeavor. Does not Jesus himself instruct us on this matter? He says that the most important command is this: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength (Mark 12:29-30).” Here, surely, is a dominical mandate for evangelical scholarship.

Well, yes and no. Certainly Jesus’s words lay a heavy emphasis on thought, on engaging the whole person, focusing on how we think as we love God – more so than our English translations always allow us to perceive. In English, to love someone with our heart (as in “I love you with all my heart”) bespeaks emotion: The heart becomes the focus of emotional engagement, while the head becomes the focus of mental or cerebral engagement. But in the Bible, the “heart” is the center of our entire being, not just of our emotions. In other words, it is very close to what we mean by “Mind,” except that it includes emotion, will and value system.

So to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength includes a huge emphasis on what and how we think; the other two words – soul and strength – bespeak intensity, total engagement. Transparently, this means that using our minds and wills in a lazy, slapdash, or arrogant way is not only pathetic, but it verges on the blasphemous. And since all truth is God’s truth, we are not far from the inference that all Christian intellectual effort offered cheerfully and wholeheartedly to God – that is, all Christian scholarship – lies close to the heart of our calling. Whether you are tackling the exegesis of Psalm 110 or examining the talk feathers of a pileated woodpecker, you are to offer the work to God and see such intellectual endeavor, such scholarship, as part and parcel of worship.

(bolded text mine)

What he said.

If people believe in God at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this God – however he, she, or it may be understood – is a loving being. But that is what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting. For this widely disseminated belief in the love of God is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology. The result is that when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture.

I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God – to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity. The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized.

If the love of God is exclusively portrayed as an inviting, yearning, sinner-seeking, rather lovesick passion, we may strengthen the hands of Arminians, semi-Pelagians, Pelagians, and those more interested in God’s inner emotional life than in his justice and glory, but the cost will be massive.

via The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God « Already Not Yet.

This book is not exciting.  Rev. Tom Carson’s life was pretty normal – though perhaps a little more difficult than average because he labored in such hard soil (the Quebec area in the ’40s and beyond).  He is not very quotable, and his journals aren’t full of moving and inspiring writing.  Rev. Carson even suffered through periods of melancholy because he didn’t have a high view of himself; he sometimes questioned his abilities and calling.  So if you want a book about self-motivation, conquering the world for Christ, starting a thriving ministry, or building a multi-campus church, don’t get this book.  You’ll be sorely disappointed.

However, if you want to see what the life of an ordinary pastor is like, this book belongs on your shelf.  I’m guessing that most of our readers are in the context of a smaller church whose pastor is not known by more than a few hundred people.  This book is for those pastors!  And I’d encourage parishioners to read it as well, just to get an idea of what its like to simply be a Christian pastor, father, and husband who does his best to follow the Lord in faith and obedience.

This book reminded me that pastors need to embrace the ordinary and be content with the place and people to which the Lord has called them, even if the ministry is small in the eyes of man.  Pastors are called to be faithful, not famous.

D. A. Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008).

shane lems

Therein lies the problem (for me anyway). I have absolutely no problem whatsoever in balancing the gospel with social justice/action and here is my big secret. Wait for it…..drum roll please. I DON’T SEPARATE THEM. I know. Aren’t I clever (no, not at all)? Here’s what I mean.

1. I simply preach the gospel. In fact, I resent the fact that I have to choose between preaching Christ and ‘loving’ people through my deeds. That is not a legitimate separation and stacks the cards heavily against the cross as THE supreme act of love in the history of the world.

2. I simply preach the gospel knowing that the God that I proclaim is the God of Micah 6:8 (look it up for yourself). So that means if I see a person in need I am not having a theological argument in my head over whether I ought to slam them with the gospel or give them a hand up. I do both, regardless of how they respond.

3. I simply preach the gospel as Christ’s ambassador because that’s what I am commanded to do first and foremost. People are going to hell and it doesn’t matter whether they go there hungry or not. What matters is that I hold out the beauty of Jesus and the great hope found in the cross. Oh, and if they’d like a bacon roll, I am happy to oblige with that too!

4. I simply preach the gospel because Jesus is the only name under heaven and earth by which men, women and children can be saved.

5. I simply preach the gospel by serving my fellow human beings in whatever way I can. I go the extra mile in loving them, easing their discomfort, trying to help them solve their issues, feed them and clothe them, earnestly pleading with them to ‘repent or perish’ because that is their greatest need.

6. I simply preach the gospel by living with people right where they are in the midst of their suffering, seeking to live a Godly and consistent life in their midst. I don’t go to conferences that talk about how to reach them, how to evangelise them and how to love them. I don’t write books on what it means to engage in a biblical, gospel led ministry to them. I just try to be salt and light right where I am.

I simply preach the gospel because I have no other answers to the many needs of my fellow man/woman. I do it out of a sense of overwhelming gratitude for where God has taken me in my life. He rescued me from the slime, He cleaned me up and He placed me right back in the mixer as a prime example of the power of the gospel and of the glory of God as found in Jesus Christ. Along the way people fed me, clothed me and put a roof over my head. They loved me and counselled me and rebuked me and even listened to me! But if they had never challenged me with the sinfulness of my sin, my hopeless condition under the judgement of a righteous, loving, just and holy God; if they hadn’t pleaded with me to repent of my sins and put my faith and trust solely in the finished work of Jesus at Calvary, then I don’t know where I would be. Well, actually, I do know exactly where I would be. Either still in prison, thinking back on the kindness of some ‘Christian types’ who gave me something to eat once but never quite plucked up the courage to share Christ with me in a way that was understandable and to the point. Or worse, and more probable, dead along with many of my friends. Dead and facing eternity in a place I can barely think about….

Social justice/action doesn’t have to lead us away from the gospel anymore than the gospel leading us away from social action/justice. We serve a God of ‘Zedek’ & ‘Mishpat’ (righteousness & justice – a little Hebrew to impress my etymological peeps out there!). All that being said, here is a little discussion from some men with much bigger brains than mine.