Here’s a selection of talks I’ve given in evangelistic settings

Carols Service:  Isaiah 9

Why the Cross?:  Matthew 26:36-46

Who is God? (an evangelistic talk on the Trinity):  Galatians 4

Come and eat with Jesus:  Mark 1:40-2:17

Right with God:  Romans 3:21-26

How not to lead a trivial life (a talk at a pub quiz): Colossians 3:4

Satisfaction in Jesus (a mission talk):  John 4

Some Christianity Explored talks (a course based in Mark’s Gospel).

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Here’s some talks I’ve given on evangelistic strategy:

Bringing People to God:  1 Peter

Doing Mission Together:  1 Peter 2:9-12

Doing Mission at Table:  Luke 14:1-24

All things to all people to save some:  1 Corinthians 9

The Word that grows the Kingdom: Mark 4:1-34

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Worship is all of life right?  Romans 12:1 right?

Well ok.  But try telling your spouse, “We don’t need to set aside special time for each other, marriage is all of life.’

No, no, no.  Church is date-night.  (My Sunday night sermon).

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I spoke every other week on Christianity Explored (an evangelistic course based in Mark’s Gospel).

Here are the odd weeks then.  The text is slightly different and I’d say better than the audio.  I often departed from my script to save time.

CE 1 – Introduction – Christianity is Christ. (Text)  (Audio)

CE 3 – Why did Jesus come?  – The problem of sin. (Text)  (Audio)

CE 5 – Grace. (Text)  (Audio)

CE 7 – What is a Christian? (Text)  (Audio)

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With week 5 the text has some extra stuff on our marriage union to Christ.

With week 7 the text has some extra stuff about how ‘taking up our cross’ is not payback for the way Christ had to take up His! It’s the very essence of our liberation.

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A few on the course have prayed to receive Jesus this week.  Please pray that they would know His presence and protection as they take their first steps with Christ.

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Close your eyes.

Imagine yourself kneeling at the side of Christ’s throne, head on His chest, His arm around your shoulder.

Christ is speaking.  He’s addressing His Father.

And this is what He’s saying: Psalm 119.

Listen in. This really is the one thing you must do.  Listen.

Add your Amens and your Thankyous as He speaks.

Find a verse or phrase to hide in your heart for today.

Pray the Lord’s prayer.

Stand up and walk into your day.

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I’ve been remiss in my Happy Friday offerings of late.  So here – have two.

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Brant Hansen draws our attention to the latest development in Wii-ship.  (Codepoke will be thrilled I’m sure).

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And Ben Myers toys with an e-mail scammer.  Very funny.

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You might think I have it in for John Piper.  You’d be wrong.

I once spotted the great man at the back of All Souls (he’d come to hear John Stott preach).  I came bounding up to him after the service intending to tell him that I’d quoted him in my sermon that morning.  But for some reason I decided that this would be proud – as though I was bragging about being a preacher.  (I know that’s nuts.  But not as nuts as what happened next).  Having rejected my opening gambit mid-bound, I found myself in front of him with nothing to say.  And what did I blurt out?   I can’t quite remember it exactly but it was something very close to “I’m a big fan.”

Can you imagine a less Piper-esque line??  He didn’t know what to say.  Which made two of us.  The whole embarassing situation was only resolved when my wife, God bless her, held out her hand and asked him about his trip.

If you ever catch me shaking my head ruefully and tutting, chances are these 90 seconds are running through my head.

Anyway, I love John Piper.  I’ll never forget a mission trip to central New South Wales in early 2002.  I’d just read Desiring God and the idea of a happy God and that my satisfaction in Him was the way to glorify Him – it was truly liberating.  And I remember being inspired to greater service by my enlarged appetite for joy.  In 40 degree heat, I spent my time carrying around trays of ice-cold water for everyone and beaming at the thought of my reward (Matt 10:42).

And I loved (and still love) quotes like this from the opening of chapter 4:

Disinterested benevolence toward God is evil.  If you come to God dutifully offering Him the reward of your fellowship instead of thirsting after the reward of His fellowship, then you exalt yourself above God as His benefactor and belittle Him as a needy beneficiary – and that is evil.

In 2003 I ran a discussion group on Desiring God and enthusiastically recommended it.  But with one significant caveat.  Chapter 1!  I didn’t like chapter 1.  I lacked a lot of the vocabulary to articulate what I didn’t like, but I didn’t like it.  And neither did anyone else in the discussion group.

Chapter 1 sets out the foundation for Christian Hedonism – the happiness of God.  But the happiness of God is defined explicitly in terms of His self-centredness.  “The chief end of God is to glorify Himself.”  And this God-talk was not really trinitarian.  In fact, talk of God pre-eminently loving Himself came before talk of how the Father loves the Son.  First His happiness is spoken of as the glory of His unrestrained sovereignty, the magnification of His own divine perfections etc.  Then Piper turns to say “one of the best ways to think about” God’s self-glorification is to think about the Father-Son relationship.  Why?  Because the Son is the Father’s Image, therefore loving the Son is a way of God loving Himself.

Do you see the logic?  First it is asserted that God loves Himself – and this is supported largely on philosophical grounds (i.e. God’s the best, He’d be unrighteous to value anything higher than what’s best, ergo He must be supremely interested in Self).  Then he turns to Trinity and says, “See?  God loves His Image – He’s a self-lover.”

But if we begin with Trinity then the Father’s love for the Son reveals not a self-centredness but an other-centredness.   God is happy not because He is self-absorbed (no-one – not even God is happy in self-absorption!).  God is happy because He is other-centred.  There is an over-flowing life of mutual self-giving in the triune relations.  That is the happiness of God.  And that is what we are invited into.

So once we’ve made that correction I am happy to call myself a Christian Hedonist.  (How could a hedonist be other than happy to be so!?).  I continue to see problems in Piper’s doctrine of God and I still want to challenge the ‘glory’ which he speaks of.  But I’ve very much valued his teaching on hedonism.  And I think it can be strengthened (not weakened) by the insistence that happiness is found – from Top to bottom – in self-giving love.

Anyway, if you want to see how I ran the Desiring God discussion group – the handouts are here.  Session 1 is where I diverge from the book.

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Here’s the John Piper quote I’ve been discussing:

And so the biblical mindset starts with the assumption that God is the center of reality. All thinking starts with the assumption that God has basic rights as the Creator of all things. He has goals that fit with his nature and perfect character. Then the biblical mindset moves out from this center and interprets the world, with God and his rights and goals as the measure of all things.  (Source)

In my last post on this I raised the following kinds of issues about that first sentence:

• Of course ‘God’ is central – theo-centrism is inescapable. The big question is ‘which theos? which God?’
• Our all-consuming passion to be centred on God says nothing about whether God’s ultimate passion is to be consumed with Himself.
• To map our ’should’s onto God commits an anthropocentrism every bit as dangerous as the person who thinks God should exist for their sake.
• God-centredness must be our response to Him – but there is no ‘must’ about His own Self-regard!
• Therefore theocentrism is indeed our theological method – but it’s not necessarily our doctrine of God.
• To determine our doctrine of God we need to look to His revelation of Himself. (John’s gospel might help here).

And it’s with those issues in mind that we turn to the second sentence.  Piper says “All thinking starts with the assumption that God has basic rights as the Creator of all things.”

His self-confessed starting point is God the Creator.  Those who’ve been following Peter Leithart’s recent posts on Athanasius might be hearing alarm bells.

Athanasius identified Arius’s problem at precisely this point.  He said:

“It is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.”

Arius began with God the Creator.  At the centre of his thinking was a God who was defined by creation (and defined in opposition to it).  Now at the heart of Arius’s problem is that this definition of deity begins by excluding Christ from full membership!  If “God = unoriginate” then the Son (whose origin is the Father) must be less than fully divine.  Arius will never get to a proper christology, because he has not begun with a proper christology.  We must begin defining God’s being as a life that includes the Son as ‘God from God’.  Only that will allow us to make sense of Christ.  But also – only that will help us to make sense of creation.

One of Athanasius’s arguments was that Arianism makes Christ dependent on creation and not the other way around.  God – who, remember, is definitionally and down to His bootstraps (so to speak) in opposition to creation – needs a mediator in order to create.  An Arian account of transcendence will not allow God to interact with creation and so Christ is the first creature who is made precisely so that God can create.  Christ is an exalted but nonetheless created mediator for the messy job of making icky matter.  Do you see – for Arius, Christ is dependent on creation.  It is God’s desire for creation that causes Christ.

But the exact opposite is the case for the trinitarian.  It is the Father’s eternal love for Christ that causes the universe.  There is a love for the Other in eternity that is spread abroad in creation.  Here we see that creation is grace.  There is not a needy Creator standing behind the world whose ultimate goal is to ‘get what’s coming to Him’.  Rather at the back of the universe is a God who is already overflowing as a Fountain of love.

If we begin with Father, Son and Spirit rather than ‘Creator’ it becomes clear that before and behind creation is fullness not emptiness – offer not demand.  Creation is a product of, and a testimony to, an inherent out-going-ness.  There are no depths to God’s eternal being that are deeper than this ’spreading goodness’ (as Richard Sibbes would say, see Ron Frost’s excellent blog).  Whatever needs we might dare to speak of in God (and if we’re trinitarians we must speak of a Dependent God) we must be equally clear that such needs are met by the dynamic reciprocity of the Persons in their mutual in-dwelling.  In these triune relations it’s God who meets God’s needs.  It’s God who upholds and satisfies God’s rights.  Or in other words – all that the Father demands, the Son accomplishes in the power of the Spirit.  It is this out-going and other-centred life that pre-dates, causes and shapes creation.

Therefore the principle of creation is the other-centredness of the Father, Son and Spirit.  When we begin with trinity we see that creation is ultimately testimony to what God is pleased to give, not what God demands to get.

And this is where I’d disagree with the way Piper sets things up.  He begins with God the Creator who has rights.  And this is a crucial decision.

I’m not suggesting for a second that he’s Arian or anything of the sort.  But I am saying that Athanasius has shown us a better starting point and set us on a better trajectory.  If we head out in error by just a degree, the divergence down the track can be considerable.

When Piper begins with ‘rights-bearing Creator’, His glory will be readily identified with getting His rights.  And then, once we bring to bear the utterly Scriptural notion of God ‘acting for His own glory’, what do we have?  We have God doing all things for the sake of getting. What is ultimate to God is, apparently, His desire to maintain His rights.

What do we want to say in response?  Well – for one thing glory as revealed by Christ and Him crucified is radically different to this.  At the cross we see that glory is not about what God ‘gets’ as much as what He gives.  And this is really where our different starting points have brought us.  Beginning with ‘Trinity’ and ‘grace’ will get you to this cross-shaped definition of glory.  Beginning with ‘Creator’ and ‘rights’ sets you off in a different direction.  Getting to the cross from here will take a grand cross-country detour and something will get distorted somewhere.

Now, let me be clear, God indeed acts for the sake of His own glory.  In fact He does all things for the sake of His own glory.  That’s totally biblical and it’s not at issue.  The issue is – what is this glory?  And I’m saying it’s God’s utter self-giving.  As CS Lewis says, “Self-giving is absolute reality.”  So when God does things for His own glory – He’s declaring that what moves Him from the depths of His being is a radical and blood-earnest other-centredness.  It’s not that we get the grace and God gets the glory.  It’s that God’s grace is His glory.

Craig, a regular commenter here, gave an excellent illustration recently.  He said he was once walking down a corridor ahead of a woman.  He stopped and held the door open for her.  She scowled and said “I hope you’re not holding the door open because I’m a lady!”  He said, brilliantly, ‘No, I’m holding it open because I’m a gentleman.’

That’s what I’m talking about!  When the LORD insists that He’s acting for His own glory, He’s declaring to the world that He’s not responding to our worth or lack of it.  Instead He’s acting according to His own loving purposes.   He loves us because He loves us.  He’s a Gentleman!  That’s why He creates, that’s why He redeems.  It’s His very nature to be out-going, self-effacing, sacrificial, other-centred.  That is His glory.

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[I]n self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm of all creation and of all being. For the Eternal Word gives Himself in mortal sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when He was crucified on Calvary He did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces what He had done at home in glory and gladness. From before the foundation of the world, Christ surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity, in obedience. And as the Son glorifies the Father, so also the Father glorifies the Son. …From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever. This is not a… law which we can escape… What is outside the system of self-giving is… simply and solely Hell… that fierce imprisonment in the self… Self-giving is absolute reality.

I know I still have a couple of posts on the Piper quote to write.  I’ll get to that…

Have you noticed the recent addition to my sidebar?  You can read some recommended posts I’ve found helpful or at least provocative.

They all seem to be by Peter Leithart.  How did that happen?  Simple.  He writes far and away the most interesting stuff.  And it makes me wonder what the rest of us are playing at…

Anyway – of particular interest to me recently has been his blogging on Athanasius and especially how we must conceive of the divine attributes in thoroughly Trinitarian ways. (e.g. here or here on ‘the dependent God’)

Athanasius argued that the Son was and is the Wisdom of the Father eternally so, such that the Father without the Son would not be wise.  Athanasius is so sure of this logic that he uses it as an argument against the Arians.  The argument goes like this – The Son is the Wisdom of the Father, the Father has never been without wisdom, therefore the Son is eternal.  Good argument huh?

But do you see the assumptions?  It does not assume that each Person has each attribute ‘in Himself’ considered apart from the Others.  Rather they possess each attribute because they possess each other.

Leithart puts it like this:

Does the Father have wisdom “in Himself”? Yes, because the Wisdom that is the Son dwells in Him  by the Spirit.  Does the Father possess His being “in Himself”?  Yes, because the Son is the fullness of His deity, and the Son indwells Him through the Spirit.  Vice versa: Does the Son have wisdom considered in Himself?  Yes, because what is “in Himself” is the fact that the Father dwells in Him in the Spirit, so that His existence “in Himself” is His existence as the Son indwelt by the Father.

And so on.

This allows us to speak of Father and Son distinctly; it also makes it clear that the Father is not Himself except as He has and is indwelt by His Son, nor is the Son Himself except as He has and is indwelt the Father.

Halden picks up on these thoughts in this stimulating post on Trinity and attributes.

It’s stuff I tried to argue a while back in these two diagrams

Another brilliant Leithart post is here on Gethsemane – Christ crushed that the oil of His anointing Spirit might spread to the world.

And you can’t beat the Old Adam doing what he does best here – offering the gospel in all its beautiful and stark freedom.

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Preached on John 1:1-2 this morning (audio here).

My last two points were this:

Jesus is God-sized

and

God is Jesus-shaped

I wonder whether much of our evangelism is aimed at persuading people of point number one.  And I wonder whether that emphasis, if divorced from the second point, is quite dangerous.

Here’s what I mean – when we tell an unbeliever that Jesus is God, this is what they hear:  “You know the god of the pub discussion – the distant, arm-chair deity, uninvolved and uncaring?  That god is who Jesus is!”

“Oh” says the unbeliever.  “Because Jesus looks quite different to that.”

“Yeah, I know” we say.  “But you need to look past all that stuff.  Whatever you see in Jesus that doesn’t look like ‘the god you’ve always believed in’ – that’s just Jesus’ human nature.  No, that’s dispensible.  What you really need to know is that Jesus is God.”

And what’s the result?  Well how many Christian testimonies run something like this…

“I have always believed in some kind of god.  And then I met Jesus.  And the preacher told me that Jesus is the god-I-always-believed-in.”

Do you see what’s happened here?  Some supposed natural knowledge of God is determining a person’s view of Christ and determining it from the outset.

It should be the other way around.  Knowledge of Jesus should revolutionize our view of God. We should tell people not only that Jesus is God-sized, we should tell them that God is entirely Jesus-shaped.

As Archbishop Michael Ramsey once said (riffing on 1 John 1:5): “God is Christlike, and in Him there is no unchristlikeness at all.”

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I dunno, this isn’t based on anything but a vague gut feeling (yeah, yeah, as opposed to my usually well-researched and even-handed analysis!)  but…

Are we afraid of preaching news that’s too good?

I just wonder whether that ‘honey mouthed’ Puritan preacher, the ’sweet-dropper’, Richard Sibbes was surrounded by a more bitter fraternity of preachers.  You can imagine them, can’t you.  Consoling one another behind closed doors that their dull and tasteless offerings were the more faithful for it.  “Sibbes is nice, but you can make the good news too good sometimes.  We need to be more measured.”

Now obviously we must preach judgement – I’m all for that. (As was Sibbes).  I intend soon to write some stuff about preaching hell.  But can we manage to preach judgement in such a way that the gospel is magnified?  I hope so.  (Cue enthusiastic comment from TheOldAdam!)

But yeah – it just seems like an unspoken rule among conservative evangelicals that the gospel offer we hold out is allowed to be somewhat encouraging.  We can even make it quite appealing, so long as we guard it around with enough conditions and qualifications.  But I do sense an unspoken fear of really and freely offering Christ in all His life-giving, Spirit-anointing goodness.

Is it just me or does anyone else feel the invisible hand of some well-meaning wowser keeping us in our chairs and urging us not to get too carried away but rather to content ourselves with being ‘challenging, clear, faithful, helpful’ and all that.  Who is that guy?  And what’s the big fear?

Anyway… just a thought I had when I should have been finishing off my sermon.  Must go and make it plainer.

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I began blogging two years ago today. Thanks to Bobby who suggested it (please pray for him and the family at the moment as they wait on troubling medical tests).

To mark this momentous occasion, I am blogging this entry from my mobile phone. Get me. Surfing the cutting edge of the information super-highway and such.

By far the most rewarding thing about my blogging experience has been to receive the many many comments you’ve written. Some of you I have known from the real world, some I’ve met here and then face to face, some only via the blog and email. But you’ve all been a tremendous encouragement to keep focussed on Jesus. So thanks!

But it occurs to me that there are those out there who read but never comment. Well here’s your chance to emerge from the shadows. Why not say hello in comments – maybe tell me where you’re from too if you like. Be great to e-greet you.

Don’t be shy now…

No (good) trinitarian theologian wants to have a fourth thing – a divine substance considered apart from the Three Persons.  But it’s important to be aware that this error (effectively having a quaternity) has two versions.  There is a vulgar quaternity and a more insidious one.

The vulgar one looks like this:

Here is the “shamrock” trinity – three bits growing out of an underlying stuff.  In practice this is, roughly, how many unthinkingly view the trinity.  Such a vulgar quaternity is rightly rejected by theologians.  It can be seen immediately that the ‘Godness of God’ is considered at a completely different level to the three Persons in their roles and relations.  What makes God God is fundamentally impersonal attributes that may be expressed in the Persons but not constituted by their mutual inter-play.  So we can safely reject this version of things.

But I find that many theologians, having rejected the vulgar quaternity, congratulate themselves prematurely.  There is also the insidious quaternity to be dealt with.  There is another way of having a fourth…

Fundamentally this error consists in conceiving of the one God separately to a consideration of the three Persons in communion.  Recently I read a theologian say “God is both one and three – both a person and a community.”  This is an example of the insidious quaternity.  One-ness and Three-ness are laid side by side to uphold a belief in the equal ultimacy of one and three.  Yet the one-ness of God is conceived of as a uni-personal one-ness – that is, it is separately considered to the multi-personal three-ness.  One and Three were not mutually interpreting truths but instead the ‘one God’ is thought of in non-communal (that is, non trinitarian) terms.

This is the approach taken by by so many doctrine of God text books where De Deo Uno (on the One God) is addressed prior to De Deo Trino (on the Trinity).   Yet, unless the two section are integrated at the deepest levels then there is grave danger of a fourth thing – i.e. “God plus Trinity” or “God apart from Trinity.“

When this theological method is followed, often (not always but most times) section one unfolds such that the Three Person’d interplay takes no meaningful part in the discussions of the attributes.  Yet, typically, these attributes are asserted to be the virtue by which God is God.  On this view it is still possible to discuss the ‘Godness of God’ without reference to the perichoretic life of the Three.  Here One-ness and Three-ness are considered to be non-competing perspectives on the same God.  This effectively means that it is possible to speak in non-triune terms about the living God.  ’God’, then, is not the same thing as ‘the Three Persons united in love’.

This is also a quaternity.  Just a more insidious one.

And the only way I can see to avoid this fourth thing is to side with the Cappodocians: God’s being consists without remainder in the Three Person’d perichoresis .

The one-ness of God is not a simple divine essence but the very unity of the Three.  The being of God is not an underlying substance (contra the vulgar quaternity).  But nor is it a separately conceived essence (contra the insidious quaternity). Rather God’s being is the very communion by which the Three are One.

Trinity is not a perspective on the one God.  Rather the only God there is is trinity.  And the only way to conceive of Him is in triune terms.  ‘God’ is ‘Trinity’.  Unless this strict identity is maintained a fourth enters in.

Thus we must never conceive of the one God in any other terms than trinitarian ones.  (Re-write the text-books!).  God’s being is in His communion (to use Zizioulas’s phrase).  His One-ness is in His communion.  And (let’s not forget) His Three-ness is in His communion – the Three are only who they are in this eternal perichoresis.   To put it another way: God is love.

Therefore let’s guard against a ‘fourth’ whenever it threatens.  Let’s reject the vulgar quaternity, but let’s also reject the insidious quaternity.  And if people call us ‘extreme social trinitarians’ or ‘tritheists’ or whatever, let them.  The dangers on the other side are far greater.

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This is a re-working of an older post on One-ness and Three-ness.

Leon Sim (sometime commenter here) has written a cracker of an essay on Irenaeus’s understanding of the Old Testament.  Of course that understanding is explicitly christocentric and Trinitarian.

Here are a couple of great quotes from the essay:

Not only does Irenaeus see Christ and the Trinitarian God to be the object of revelation, but he also sees Christ to be the subject or agent of God’s revelation. For Irenaeus, it is not merely incidental, but crucial, that it is the Word who spoke to the patriarchs and prophets, and “preach[ed] both Himself and the Father alike,” (Against Heresies 4.6.6.)…

…In one sense, Irenaeus reads the Old Testament Christologically and Trinitarianly because He sees that the Father does everything through the Son by the Holy Spirit. In another sense, he also does so because he holds creation, salvation and revelation together, that is, it is the Father’s purpose in creation to save and bring men to Himself through the revelation of His Word by the Spirit. Hence if there is to be salvation for humanity in the Old Testament, it must be through the revelation of the Spirit-anointed Son…

…According to Irenaeus, therefore, anyone who follows in the non-Christological interpretation of the Old Testament – assuming that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were unknown or unrecognisable through the Old Testament itself – have followed unbelieving Jews in departing from the true God and any knowledge of Him: “Therefore have the Jews departed from God in not receiving His Word, but imagining that they could know the Father [apart] by Himself, without the Word, that is, without the Son; they being ignorant of that God who spake in human shape to Abraham, and again to Moses.” (Against Heresies 4.7.4.)

Read the whole thing here.

Download an easier to read format here.

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^“38 Jesus said “Watch out for the Bible Bloggers.  They love to parade their stats and gain comments from their adoring readers, ³⁹ to be linked on all the best sites and highly ranked on Technorati. ⁴⁰ They devour the weak and vulnerable and, for a show, make lengthy posts.  Such men will be punished most severely.” 

(Mark 12:38-40, Glen’s Literal (and self-condemning) Translation)

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