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Every church has its own culture. The question is, how fully does its culture align with its doctrine? Whatever the answer, a church’s culture always reveals whatever the people most deeply believe. Not every truth that preached is believed down at the level of felt, shared reality.
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The gospel–and justification in particular–calls for more than doctrinal subscription. It also calls for cultural incarnation.
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Legalism is our native tongue.
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It is possible to preach and defend the doctrine of justification by grace alone out of motives of self-justification–and to do so with its bitter fruit.
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In a gospel-shaped church, for starters, people are honest in confession, bear one another’s burdens, and seek to outdo one another in showing honor.
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Without the doctrine, the culture is unsustainable. Without the culture the doctrine appears pointless.
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The ultimacy of Christ does not position us to go with the crowd, not even the Christian crowd, as if we need Christ plus human applause to stand on our own two feet.
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The reassuring finality of “it is finished” had been eroded away by the acids of legalism. And self-justification creates only howling demand that nothing outside Christ can satisfy.
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There’s the gospel in four words: “Christ has welcomed us.”
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The church isn’t just meant to be a new community (there are plenty of those constantly springing up); it’s meant to be a new kind of community. This entails a different kind of welcome–one that’s ultimate origin isn;t earth but heaven. We don’t just welcome one another; we welcome one another as Christ has welcomed us.
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Mercy is not getting what we deserve. Grace is getting what we don’t deserve.
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We’re not meant to be conveying our welcome but Christ’s welcome. It is not about exchanging a cultural pleasantry but declaring a heavenly reality. We’re meant to be inviting brokenhearted sinners to collapse into the open arms of Jesus.
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The welcome on a Sunday morning is where we pastors deconstruct the posing of nongospel culture and reconstruct in its place the beauty of gospel culture.
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Whatever darkness inside of you troubles your heart, whatever capacities for wickedness and stupidity lurk within, whatever still haunts you from your past, however fearful you are that you will never change, know this: your sin does not intimidate Jesus. What is right in him far out-weighs what is wrong in you. There is more grace in him than guilt in you. He is better at saving than you are at sinning.
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Biblical hospitality, however, is about opening up to others rather than trying to impress them. This means all of us can be great at hospitality. It only takes humble willingness.
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The deepest reason for all our personal problems, and all the evils of history, is that we don’t know how beautiful God is. We barricade ourselves against the one we can most eagerly receive. Without him all we’re left with is ourselves.
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If God really is light with no darkness at all, if God really is beauty with nothing distasteful at all, then we really can come out of hiding. We can get real with him. We can get real with one another. We don;t have to appear better than we really are.
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The hope of the gospel frees our hearts from brooding self-focus, leaving us with nothing to give others. Instead, we look around at one another, and we start coming alive to “Christ in you, hope of glory.” (Col. 1:27)
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The most noteworthy thing about you is not you but God’s love for you.
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There’s a difference between Bible-based and being biblical. Being Bible-based is simply using Scripture, often just a verse or two, to justify what you’re saying, but being biblical is making sure what you’re saying is true to what Scripture as a whole says.
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Apparently there’s a form of orthodox theology in hell. So, before we congratulate ourselves on having sound doctrine, we need to remember that believing the right, scriptural things isn’t enough.
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Grace is not like a runway, the thing that launches us off. Grace is the plane itself. We get nowhere apart from God’s grace.
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Leadership in the church is to be fundamentally different from leadership in the world. The characteristics so visible in this world’s rulers are to have no place among Jesus’s people. Jesus himself shows us that greatness is not to be measured by prowess but service, not by following the examples of the world but by imitating the Savior before us, not by being served but by serving others.
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Leadership that only takes is an ever-present danger.
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Inasmuch as we’re to put others” in their place,” it should be to put them above us, not beneath us.
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If a believer has certain doctrinal views or behaves in certain ways simply because a pastor has coerced such behavior, then those views or actions do not proceed from faith. It’s not the Spirit of Christ who has brought them about but the forcefulness of the leader. This is catastrophic because such a believer isn’t led by the Lord, but by man.
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People’s deepest impression of who Christ is will inevitably come from what they perceive their pastor’s heart toward them is.
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The pastor must demonstrate ongoing repentance, for no Christian grows without repentance.
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Age is valued as being a form of spiritual capital and a blessing to the church, not a hindrance.
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The quality of our relational life in our churches is to be an apologetic to the world around us.
