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August 23 - November 7, 2023
When you know the Story behind the stories, then you see it everywhere, “from the ugly duckling who turns out to be a swan, to Beauty and the Beast, the Beauty who gives up all of her happiness to throw herself in the arms of this Beast and, because of her incredible sacrifice, gets a love and frees this person beyond anything she ever understood.”
She argued that when God prohibits women from teaching or usurping authority over men, it’s not because women are incompetent or lacking in giftedness. Rather, church and home show us how God in the Old Testament relates to his covenant people, and how in the New Testament Christ relates to his bride, the church. Both relationships require subordination. “The Church has always seen such imagery as highly important, not random, accidental, or trivial, and therefore not to be tampered with,” Elliot said. She saw male and female as woven into the creative fabric of the world. “It is the very
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Kathy credited EE (as she was quietly known) for being the first person to help her understand gender roles as a gift from God instead of as an embarrassment or curse.
Creation has as one of its fundamental themes the pattern of rule and submission. Power and passivity, ebb and flow, generativity and receptivity are but a few of the ways that these paired polarities have been described. The Chinese called them yin and yang and made the symbol of their religion a graphic representation of their interaction. Even the physical realm is founded on and held together by the positive and negative attraction of atomic particles. Everywhere the universe displays its division into pairs of interlocking opposites. .
We know that this order of rule and submission is descended from the nature of God Himself. Within the Godhead there is both the just and legitimate authority of the Father and the willing and joyful submission of the Son. From the union of the Father and the Son proceed a third personality, the Holy Spirit. He proceeds from them not as a child proceeds from the union of a man and woman, but rather as the personality of a marriage proceeds from the one flesh which is established from the union of two separate personalities. Here, in the reflection of the nature of the Trinity in the
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Only when we can see God as far surpassing us in goodness and wisdom, when we behold him in glory, can we obey what we don’t necessarily comprehend in his commands.
Even many outside the church convert during revivals, because for the first time, they hear the gospel as the power to raise the dead rather than a stump speech for moral and conservative values.
He argued that revival intensifies the Spirit’s normal work of convicting sinners, regenerating and sanctifying them, and assuring them of God’s grace. The Spirit does so through the ordinary means of grace—namely, preaching, prayer, and sacraments.
Even when Christians know in their heads that God accepts them by faith through the grace of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, they don’t always live that way. Day to day, they believe that God loves them because they obey his law.
Dividing the world between good and bad people misses the heart of what makes Christianity so revolutionary. Preferences about displays of emotion, song selection, and length of service can vary from culture to culture while still conveying the same Christian faith. But Christians often treat their preferences as absolute requirements for faithful practice.
Revival, however, breaks down the world’s barriers, as Christians trust only in Jesus and not in their cultural preferences.
“Only if our highest love is God himself can we love and serve all people, families, classes, races; and only God’s saving grace can bring us to the place where we are loving and serving God for himself alone and not for what he can give us,” Keller explained. “Unless we understand the gospel, we are always obeying God for our sake and not for his.”
A good and faithful sermon will help Christians see the excellency of Jesus and not merely his usefulness.
Keller found that preaching fails to connect when it’s not answering questions. Pastors either become distant and abstract in their teaching, or they work out their own problems in the pulpit.
Inspired by these lectures, Keller would himself make the self-sacrifice of God the climax of countless sermons. In fact, he argued that the only real love that changes lives is substitutionary sacrifice:
Love that really changes things and redeems things is always a substitutionary sacrifice.
Clowney married piety with predestination when he told the Gordon-Conwell students that we only ever understand doctrine on our knees before God. In prayer we can praise what we don’t prefer.
Edmund Clowney also challenged students to approach the Bible with hearts broken by their sin and humbled by a recognition of their hypocrisy.
As Keller would later put it, crediting Clowney, the Bible is either about what we’re supposed to do or what Jesus has done.
“The thing that really separates us from God is not so much our sin, but our damnable good works.”
If there is no dance, if there is no music, if there is no joy in your life it’s because, either like the prodigal you’re letting your badness get in the way of God, or like the Pharisee you’re letting your goodness get in the way. You’re trying to control him one way or the other. I don’t care how religious you are. If there’s no joy and there’s no dance, you still don’t get it.
The primary hindrance to contextualization is our own blind spots. We can’t see our own culture with sufficient perspective on its strengths and weaknesses.
For Keller, this meant training leaders not to see church as an escape from the hated city but a place to learn how to meet the city’s needs, both spiritual and physical.
The world isn’t accustomed to a church that cares just as much about expositional preaching as it does about justice for the poor. But at Redeemer, these goals would be theologically inseparable.33
A missional church will be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional fundamentalist churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional liberal churches.
The gospel is not just the ABCs but the A to Z of the Christian life. It is inaccurate to think the gospel is what saves non-Christians, and then Christians mature by trying hard to live according to biblical principles. It is more accurate to say that we are saved by believing the gospel, and then we are transformed in every part of our minds, hearts, and lives by believing the gospel more and more deeply as life goes on.
“It first says, ‘I am more sinful and flawed than I ever dared believe,’ but then quickly follows with, ‘I am more accepted and loved than I ever dared hope.’
Most people only know prayer meetings as maintenance. Christians share concerns for the physical well-being of known members. But frontline prayer confesses sin, seeks humility, pursues the lost, and yearns to know God face-to-face, to encounter his glory.14
when preachers target only believers, they tend to make Christians harsh, cold, and self-satisfied. When they don’t evangelize in their sermons, preachers produce Pharisees.27
Dead is when you’re trying to earn your salvation or designing your own, Tim said. Dead is when you never weep with joy over what God has done for you. Dead is when God is never more than an abstraction, an idea. The gospel humbles and emboldens and melts us with understanding what Jesus has done on the cross. Dead is when we don’t know God as Father but only as boss or vague influence.
Christians don’t fall asleep when they die. That’s when they finally wake up.
Idolatry results when culture turns away from its God-glorifying purpose.
Sometimes it takes failure to realize we’ve turned goods into gods.
The West wants to be relativistic and moralistic at the same time. And it’s not working, as these four critics have argued for decades.3
They are choosing to be the selves their cultures tell them they may be. In the end, an identity based independently on your own inner feelings is impossible.
According to Taylor, secularism doesn’t only mean that people stop believing in God. As Keller explained in a sermon on Psalm 111, in our secular age, the view of God becomes thinner. God is remote.
the pre-Enlightenment view, we exist for God and serve him. But in the modern view, Taylor observes, God only exists for our benefit.11
apologetics tends to shore up Christian belief more than convince skeptics.
the post-Christian West is the most resistant, challenging missionary frontier of all time.
None of the most common Christian responses will suffice for an effective missionary program.
seven steps, deeply informed by the neo-Calvinism of Kuyper and his allies.
The first step is promoting incisive public apologetics.
Second, horizontal and vertical dimensions of the faith must be integrated.
The mainline can’t just care about social problems. And evangelicals can’t just care about spiritual problems.
Justification must lead t...
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Third, a critique of secularism must emerge from within ...
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Fourth, Christian community must disrupt the culture’s social categories.
laity must integrate their faith with their work.
the local church must be informed by the global church.
not to miss the difference between grace and religion.
