Entries tagged with “Gospel”.


My column for the September/October issue of The Canadian Lutheran is available online. That issue of the magazine had a dual focus on international missions and remembering the Reformation. I like to think I tied together those two focuses together in a fairly coherent way in my article, reflecting on St. Paul’s teaching that our faith moves us to share the Gospel. “We believe, therefore we have spoken.” The good news of salvation through God’s grace—the Reformation truth of justification—is not something we keep to ourselves. We can’t keep it to ourselves. It bursts forth from our lips—the Good News that Christ’s death and resurrection has accomplished our salvation.

cl2805-coverLuther could not keep quiet about this discovery; the Good News that we are declared righteous through faith in the Gospel was something everyone needed to know. Like Luther, we too are motivated by the Spirit to tell others that God accepts them on the basis of Christ’s mercy, not their works. Indeed, our faith compels us to share the Gospel. St. Paul explains it well: “It is written: ‘I believed; therefore I have spoken.’ With that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in His presence. All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God” (2 Corinthians 4:13-15).

Read the whole article online here: We believe, therefore we speak.

My latest at First Thoughts has caused a bit of a ruckus. Check it out here: “Why Lutheran Predestination isn’t Calvinist Predestination.”

The disparity between the identification of Calvinists with predestinarian doctrine vis à vis Lutherans is precisely because the concept of predestination that exists in the public mind is Calvinist, not Lutheran. People hear the word “predestination” and think of the Calvinist doctrine of double-predestination—the idea that God has chosen some to be saved and chosen others to be damned (or, put in less inflammatory language, that God has chosen some to be saved and others he has not so chosen). Either way it amounts to the same thing: those who are damned are damned because of God’s (lack of) choice. Calvin himself writes, “We assert that by an eternal and immutable counsel, God has once for all determined both whom he would admit to salvation and whom he would condemn to destruction” (Institutes 3.21.7).

Such a doctrine is abhorrent to Lutherans. And, indeed, contemplation of such a doctrine was abhorrent also to Luther.

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I’ve forgotten to mention a few of my recent articles, so this is somewhat of a clean-up post. These three articles appeared in The Canadian Lutheran between March and June, 2012. The titles and a brief selection appear below, followed by links to the articles online. Given that my column for the July/August issue will be appearing online soon, it makes sense to mention these older ones now.

Let’s start with the most recent article (appearing in the May/June issue). Entitled “A key named ‘Promise,'” the piece uses John Bunyan’s struggle with despair to encourage Christians today who struggle with guilt and worry whether God might not forgive them. Author and scholar Gene Veith had a positive response over at Cranach when this article first came out.

A key named ‘Promise’

Bunyan could find no cure for despair in himself. No, the cure could only be found in the promises of Christ—in the Gospel. And so it is that, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian only escapes Giant Despair when he remembers he carries a key in his bosom. The key’s name is ‘Promise,’ and it opens the prison doors.

Despair was not Bunyan’s problem alone. It existed long before Bunyan, and it continues to plague people long since. We see glimpses of it in ourselves when we worry that we have finally sinned too much. When we fear our faith is not strong enough to save. When we’ve let God down one too many times. But just as it did with Bunyan, Scripture comes running after us in these moments, reminding us of the promises of Christ. The Holy Spirit is at work in the Word, drawing us ever to Himself, opening our hearts to believe the promises of God.

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The other two articles appeared in the March/April issue of The Canadian Lutheran. The first, “Gospel-motivated love,” is my column for the issue. It attempts to demonstrate how, in loving our neighbour, we can open the door to evangelism. The second, “Into Africa,” is a feature piece discussing how the Gospel gives us the desire to do social ministry in the first place, drawing on my (then) recent trip to Mozambique, Lesotho, and South Africa. The latter piece (“Into Africa”) was also reproduced in part in Canadian Lutheran World Relief’s May newsletter.

 

Gospel-motivated love

‘I thought I was in the the Twilight Zone,” he told The Christian Post. “These people are acting like what the Bible says a Christian does.” He saw genuine concern for his well-being, despite his opposition to Christianity. And so he turned to the Scriptures, eager to find what could motivate such selfless love. There, by the grace of God, he found Christ.

Let’s be clear: acts of love didn’t convert the man. But they did drive him to the Word of God, the very tool the Holy Spirit uses to engender faith. The good works of Christians pointed him back to the God who motivates good works.

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Into Africa

Just as Christ took pity on the countless sick, the mourning, the poor, and the hungry, we too are called to show compassion to those less fortunate than us, and to share with them the blessings God has bestowed upon us. Indeed, it’s in acknowledging how good He has been to us that we find the impetus to love our neighbour. God first loved us—without our ever deserving it. That selfless love inspires us by the Holy Spirit to love others….

While thanks for salvation may motivate Christians to care for and love each others, that shouldn’t be the only role the Gospel plays. ‘In doing humanitarian work, we must do it in such a way that the world knows that the aid does not just fall from the sky or come out of our pockets,’ Dr. Neitzel explains. ‘We must be clear that there is is Someone who is the provider. And this Someone is the Creator who created us, sustains us, and gave His Son to die for us and save us.’ Loving our neighbours means caring for them in both body and soul. And caring for the soul means proclaiming the Gospel.

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In a follow up to the previous post, I want to draw your attention to an interview with Bryan Chapell at Christianity Today‘s website. Chapell, President of Covenant Theological Seminary (in St. Louis, Missouri), the seminary of the Presbyterian Church in America, has recently released his newest book Christ-Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape our Practice. In “Transcending the Worship Wars” , Chapell discusses the importance of getting past musical preference in the debate over worship and digging into the real theological issues – primarily, “letting the Gospel shape” our understanding of what worship is and how it should be done. And he identifies ‘rewriters’ (see last post) as evidence of a growing “new balance and maturity in the church” in its theological approach to worship.