The Glorious Deeds of Christ

“Taking your Eyes Off the Cross”

I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.

1 Corinthians 1:10

The historic church is the people of God who are redeemed by the blood of Christ, justified by faith in him, and are equipped by the Holy Spirit to do the words and works of Christ and it is a visible community made known by the bishops in apostolic order who by the grace of God minister the sacraments of Christ to the people of God.

The problem is that frequently, we do not act like God’s own blood-bought people. We allow hurt feelings, personal agendas, misunderstandings, false expectations, etc., to deter us from our unity found in Christ. We forget that we are all sinners redeemed by the precious blood of the Lamb and that none of us are better than any of us.

The ways of destroying the church are many and colorful. Raw factionalism will do it. Rank heresy will do it. Taking your eyes off the cross and letting other, more peripheral matters dominate the agenda will do it-admittedly more slowly than frank heresy, but just as effectively over the long haul.

Building the church with superficial ‘conversions’ and wonderful programs that rarely bring people into a deepening knowledge of the living God will do it. Entertaining people to death but never fostering the beauty of holiness or the centrality of self-crucifying love will build an assembling of religious people, but it will destroy the church of the living God.

Gossip, prayerlessness, bitterness, sustained biblical illiteracy, self-promotion, materialism-all of these things, and many more, can destroy a church. And to do so is dangerous: ‘If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple (1 Cor. 3:17).” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31).

D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: Leadership Lessons from 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 83-84.

HT: Justin Taylor

. . . As Instruments of His Righteousness

Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living.

Rom. 6:18 (NLT)

God does not need us in the sense that he is lacking something. God is sufficient and complete in himself. Sometimes it is said that God created us because he was lonely. God needed a love relationship and therefore God made us for companionship. Yes, our relationship with God is one of love, but that love is an overflow of the eternal love relationship found between the members of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, God did not create us for love for he already had a complete and fulfilling love relationship within himself (John 17:23).

God needs us in the sense that we are representatives of his kingdom called to reach out to a hurting and lost world (1 Cor. 12:12-13). God needs us to display in our lives and actions the character and nature of Christ (1 John 4:9). God wants to operate in and through us as instruments of his love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness (John 17:25-26).

“Yield your members as instruments” (Rom. 6:18)–your bodies, your bodily members, your mental faculties. God needs your eyes, through which to look out with compassion upon the world; with a compassion that will care enough, it may be, to go, to speak, or to pray. God needs your feet, to carry the message of His concern and the message of His grace. God needs your hands, to toil, and by their touch reveal His love. God needs your lips to speak for righteousness and truth. God needs your heart, to throb with concern and compassion. God needs you. Where are the instruments in the hand of God?

George E. Duncan, “Responsive Surrender to God’s Will,” Daily Thoughts from Keswick: A Year’s Daily Readings, ed., Herbert F. Stevenson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980), 322.

Christ has no body now but yours

No hands, no feet on earth but yours

Yours are the eyes through which He looks

Compassion on this world

Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good

Yours are the hands with which He blesses all the world

Yours are the hands

Yours are the feet

Yours are the eyes

You are His body

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

Words by St. Theresa of Avila: Music by John Michael Talbot

Ministering One to Another

Body Life ministry begins with each parishioner attending services prepared to bless, encourage, and exhort others to greater trust in Christ. Body Life ministry is a celebration of spiritual gifts; all members of the body are encouraged to discover and use their gifts. Also, this ministry is a recognition that all believers are ministers, not just the clergy; the ministerial priesthood is to build up and equip the entire body of believers to be ministers in the church and in the world. Body Life ministry is a pervasive spirit of love and unity, resulting in an attractive, persuasive evangelistic witness to the world (Eph. 4:3; John 13:35). (Ray Stedman).

This Sunday at Lamb of God, we will take time to minister to one another in the Spirit of Christ as a form of Body Life ministry. Be prepared to share a word of prophecy, word of knowledge, scripture text, or devotional thought during an extended ministry time on Sunday. Pray that God will grace us with his Holy Spirit and manifest his gracious gifts among us.

In Colossians, the Apostle Paul includes ministering one to another as a mark of Christian worship and devotion (Col. 3:15-17). In Ephesians, fullness of the Spirit is linked to encouragement, inspired singing, and thankfulness (Eph. 5:18-20). Peter sees an urgency in worship because the second coming of Christ is imminent (1 Peter 4:7-11).

The Case Against Individualism

For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For in fact the body is not one member but many.

1 Cor. 12:12-14 (NKJV)

Individualism is a false conviction of the heart which says that I am not answerable, responsible, or obligated to anyone including friends, family, church leaders or even God. It is self-deception which masks itself as a “leading from God,” but portrays an attitude of rebellion toward God’s revealed will.

Individualism in the Christian life is a destructive force. Individualism says that I can live the Christian life without the joy of fellowship, without accountability, without encouragement, without guidance, and without the sacraments. An individualistic mindset shuns authority, responsibility, and community. It says that I can live the Christian life without you, the body of Christ. I don’t want to be challenged. I don’t want my blind spots exposed. I don’t want to minister to needy people and serve others. I want to do my own thing  just me, my Bible, and God.

Individualism fails to understand that the day I was baptized, I was brought into the Body of Christ and placed in covenant relationship with other believers. Individualism refuses to acknowledge the biblical truth that I cannot grow in my relationship with Jesus without the help and assistance of other believers (Eph. 4:11-13).

The Christian life is a “new community: a new family, a new pattern of human togetherness which results from the unity of the Lord’s people in the Lord, henceforth to function under the one Father as a family and a fellowship” (J.I. Packer).

By becoming a Christian, I belong to God and I belong to my brothers and sisters. It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church. My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ. This is my identity. This is our identity. . . . If the church is the body of Christ, then we should not live as disembodied Christians.

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church (Wheaton, Ill, Crossway Books, 2008), 41.

HT: Of First Importance

The Emptiness of the West Without Christ

The fool has said in his heart,

“There is no God.”

They are corrupt,

They have done abominable works,

There is none who does good.

The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men,

To see if there are any who understand, who seek God.

They have all turned aside,

They have together become corrupt;

There is none who does good,

No, not one.

Psalm 14:1-3

German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, an atheist, acknowledged:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

HT: Ignatius Insight Blog

Missional is an attitude and an approach which recognizes that whether I am home or away my resident culture needs to be reached for Christ. A missional mindset recognizes that the North American culture is just as much in the need of the gospel as the deepest, darkest parts of Africa. In short, missional means being a missionary where you are from your church to your culture and in your context.

Missional implies taking the approach of a missionary—being indigenous to the culture, seeking to understand and learn, adapting methods to the mission field—but winding up in the biblical form of a church.

[Ed Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2006), xii.]

Answer: the Holy Spirit.

If I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.

1 Tim. 3:15 (ESV)

The dependence of the church on the Word is not a doctrine readily acceptable to all. In former days of Roman Catholic polemic, for example, its champions would insist that ‘the church wrote the Bible’ and therefore has authority over it. Still today one sometimes hears this rather simplistic argument. Now it is true, of course, that both Testaments were written within the context of the believing community, and that the substance of the New Testament in God’s providence … was to some extent determined by the needs of the local Christian congregations.In consequence, the Bible can neither be detached from the milieu in which it originated, nor be understood in isolation from it.

Nevertheless, as Protestants have always emphasized, it is misleading to the point of inaccuracy to say that ‘the church wrote the Bible’; the truth is almost the opposite, namely that’God’s Word created the church’. For the people of God may be said to have come into existence when his Word came to Abraham, calling him and making a covenant with him. Similarly, it was through the apostolic preaching of God’s Word in the power of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost that the people of God became the Spirit-filled body of Christ.

John Stott, Authentic Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 303.