The enemies to obedance

Three difficulties we face : the world the flesh and the devil

deviel a real being with helpers (Demons) He is called the adversary for he us aganst us,  the tempter for its his job and the accuser of the brethren for he loves to do it day and night. This enemeies Activity is both personal and social. Personal 

The flesh simple impulse towards autonomy it is sa desire for the wrong things. A desire rising from a disposition rooted in pride or insecurity.

World is an atmosphere  - a cultural mood that follows the flesh and is over seen by principalities and powers. It is more than just the social but the product of the flesh and the demonic. It is the socailized flesh with its desires that become the values systems and habits of beleavors that inevitably make us. As One theologian has put it “humanity is a culture making being that then has culture make him.” Each generation has a world to deal with and it builds on the old (whether it be by rejection or adoption) but it alwasy comes with a new danger.

Three gifts from our enemys

What is the world give you?
A way of being - a name or idenity – False self
A way of seeing - a worldview
A way of doing - style of life

What does the devil give you?
A Hard Time
Temptation and Oppression (ie. depression etc.)

What the flesh gives you?
Wrong things to love - inner tremptation 
The heart is an idol factory 

A disposition to make self-righteousness(I am better) or unrestrained (I am my own king) the rule of life. 

A disposition to make autonomy my rule of faith. 

A long obedience in the same direction begins by returning the gifts from your three enemies. 

Continuing in Christain life is a long term reeducation in 
who God says you are
how God sees the world
what style of life God wants you live

It involves giving the devil a hard time
when the enemy reminds you of your sin tell him to take it up with Jesus.  

Thank Christ for his work on your behalf. 
If he reminds you of your past you remind him of his future.

Thank Christ for his work on your behalf. 

It means following after Christ - When you want to follow the desire of the flesh. 

It means dally dieing by Choose to seek what the spirit's desire, and the Spirit’s desires to make much of Christ the Holy Spirit’s desire is always the person of Christ. 

Discipleship: The Christain Journey

I. Two Bad mindsets

1. the Tourest mindset: doing but disengaged
     a. Only around for the entertanment

2. the spectator mindset: not doing but engaged
     b. Only around for the information


II. Two Biblical Descriptions for a Christain

1. Discipler
     a. A Disciple can't be tourest
     b. Disiple in greek means Learner
     c. one enageged in process of learning

2. Pilgram - spending life going someplace
    a. A Pilgram can never be spectatator.
    b. Pilgram implys the person is in action.
    c. A Pilgram is a Follower not a Fan.


III. Every pilgram had...

1. Path: the path is distict.
     a. It bares the shape of the life jesus taught and lived
     b. A life shaped by service, death and reserection.
2. Place: the Distination is God
3. Process: The art of living out the gospel    


IV.  Every disciple must learn...

Three types of ethical knowlage
    1. Knowlage of God's character
         a. Normative perspective - The foundational values they have made their life goal.
    2. Knowlage of an ethical life
         a. Sicuational perpsective - The shape of the life jesus taught
    3. How-to-knowlage of the gosepl living.
         a. The existencal perpective - the reality of the gospel in human life.
         b. How the gospel is the process by which we live ethical lives?
         c. How the gsopel enabling us to handle failure and cultivate virtue.

Piper, shells, and Love that transcends culture.

Sometime one moment changes everything. Piper at one day in 2000. That sermon recked me in the best of ways. I still have the journal I wrote in that night - Will not bore you with the details but here are some highlights -

“heard piper today - cried over the nations and I don’t know why - overwhelming - undone.” 

“I think I have been repurposed” 

“will fight the rest of my life - may I never sacrifice speaking what God tells me to say on the alter of being liked” 

“I can’t die with shells in my hands!” 

“oh God this changes everything.”

“I have never been normal - always the outlier always the black sheep - at lest that remain the same.”

Found a video (link below) on Piper’s shells illustration and the guy is right - It may be the single most influincal illustration of my generation. Here is why I say that: 

I personally have seen this sermon transcended culture. I have seen It’s infunace reaching far beyond the English speaking world. When I first heard it I was like the tin man. It broke me only to replace my heart with the nations. Four years later I was siting in a Turkish man livingroom. Still sleepy from the flight and a little weary in a culture so different from my own. At the time, I knew only three word of Turkish and they were bathroom and pay bill. He did not know much English and our seasoned interpitor was off running an errand. We sat in silence smiling and nodding, Over and over. If people could transform into emotions I would become an awkward turtle in the moment. Scanning the room I saw a “one day” video. Walking over I pulled it out A little relieved to see something familiar - behind me I heard him say

“Piper?”

Turning I said “Piper?!”

He laughed “Piper!” 

I smiled “yep, Piper!” 

He said “shells” and gestured like he was stabbed in the heart.

I was silent for a moment then slowly returned the same gesture “shells”. I would soon find out he was training to be a pastor because of that sermon. He would soon find out because of that sermon I was in Turkey to help him reach his goal. In the moment, We just hugged, laughed and repeating the same two words till they became to us a prayer. 

Some things transcend cultures the gospel and good preaching are such things. They can 

Build bridges to worlds where brotherly love and friendship may be found without an interpitor.  Along the way making it possible for an unsure homesick missionaries to feel the warmth of home on the other side of the world. 

As a Footnote - when the interpreter returned she did not know what to think. Both of us were red eyed from crying and oddly enough laughing.(I don’t really know why the laughing everything was just funny). We were watching the sermon like it was a movie. We both had popcorn and large drinks. We would stop it at our favorite spots and act out how it made us feel and how the Lord dealt with us. I showed him where I was sitting - He did the best Piper impression I have ever seen (by a Turkish man). 

I think it goes without saying but I will anyway.  Don’t let our fan boy ways confuse you. Piper was just a means of our joy rolling up to glory in Jesus. Piper was more like an usher. He showed us to our seats. We were their to see Jesus and Jesus was the one on display, He alone took center stage and we beheld his glory. Put another way, Piper’s sermon was the catalyst for my friendship but Jesus was the glue. He was our friend in common. He was the one we both knew. How else could a middle aged Turkish national and a 23 year old American ever find common ground but at the cross. While Piper was great and all.  It was the gospel fire burning in both our hearts that warmed our friendship. I think Piper would agree. 

Conclusion 
Below is a video about pipers sermon at One Day. It’s a little slow in pace and long on exposition. The narrator is a bit needlessly exaggerated BUT a good video none the less. It is produced by southern seminary so bit of a sly advertising. Also if your looking for a seminary southern (SBTS) is ok but southeastern (SEBTS) is better .. yea my Alma mater. 

Why John Piper’s shells illustration transformed a generation

"Imago Dei" value statement, theological definition or both?

Imago Dei is latin for "image of God" . The conept that deals with the creation of humanity. The image of God has an illusive definition. Theologians are not in consensus on what is meant by the term. The term has its roots in Genesis 1:27, "God created mankind in his own image.." In way of a workable definition not much is clear from the scriptural evidence. What is clear is the the irreducible value of human life resulting form the statement. Below is a definition baced on the evidance and its profound implications for human life.

I. As far as definitions Go
1.) The image of God is not the physical external form of humanity. Humans do not look like God in that way.

2.) The imago Dei is a condition of man's creation. It is a characteristic of what is to be human, Image bearing goes deeper than mere form, and touches on the ontological essence of humanity. Thus to be human and to be in the image of God. The two can't be divided. Human equals image bearer.

3.) image of God implies that humans are not like the rest of creation. The image of God reveals the uniqueness of humanity in comparison to rest of creation.

4.) Image of God implies that humans are like God. This aspect of our humanness means we image God in some way or capacity. Thus, Human experience is an experience of image bearing. Yet if we Take the discution out of the realm of facts and place it in the realm of value the consept blossoms. In God's image to the degrees God has value is the degree humanity has value. God of the bible is transcendent, above all human measures of glory, honor, and worth. He is transcendent value. It follows, humanity has intrinsic value because we are made in the image of transcendent value.

II. More than an idea, a way of feeling about others
It may be that the imago dei was revealed not for our theological reflection but our ethical direction. The moral implications of the imago Dei are apparent in the fact that God is transcendent in value therefor to be made in his image mean the value of human life is:
(a) intrinsically located in our humanness thus cannot be changed in any way.
(b) individually applied for each person bears God's image in our common humanity
(c) universally mandated for all people without exception. Event human has the right to be treated in keeping with the value they possess. Almost naturally we assumed such a value of ourselves yet selfishly withhold the same assessment of others. Jesus assumes the imago dei standard of value in the golden rule. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

I have value because I am made in the image of God
Other people have value because they are made in the image of God
I should treat others with the dignity and self-respect, I have as a image bearer of God.

The golden rule is not grounded in a standered of self-love, or in aselfish impulse or enlighten self-interest but a dignity that rise from seeing oneself as an image bearer of God. At this point, we can begin to see the concept of the imago dei as more than a theological idea, but a way of feeling about others rooted in an objective value. Here is another example.

We can also deduce a standered of value for neighbor love from the Imago Dei. Assuming the proposition that humans are to love God in keeping with his transcendent value, then humans must love other humans, as each is an image bearer and expression of God.

Every human is my neighbor
Humanity has intrinsically valuable, just as I am valuable
I should love my neighbor in keeping with their intrinsic value.

Neighbor love has a standard of value rooted in the imago dei. A standard marked out by God's  transcendent value and made concreat by our assessment of ourselves as image bearers. When we like the Good Samaritan, see someone in need we should see a being of untold value, worthy of respect and dignity on the grounds that they are human like us, made in God's image like us.

Plows like people

When I was young, my granddad had an old horse drawn plow. Just an old farming tool, bent and twisted from a lifetime of honest service. It was rusted and broken to the point of being unrecognizable. Yet It fascinated me.

Sometimes I feel like that plow - as if life has bent and twisted me, making me almost a mystery to myself. But that is not as bad, as bad things go. I learned that from the plow. A plow is broken down by plowing. Doing what it was created to do results in it being unrecognizable.

But that is not how we begin. Such change dose not happen in a moment but over a lifetime. When we start out our heads are filled with possibility and dreams often only the fruit of a delinquent heart. Yet such misguided wishes never die easy. In time what one knows of hopes and dreams; what was thought of as life and future; the pleasant dreams of youth, are slowly sanded away till all that remains is a smooth simple hope, uncluttered and fixed.

Plows - like people - have scars.  Life is hard like fallow ground. It can be cruel and unforgiving. The process will warp and change you, scrap and scar you, but that is just part of living.  All the scars, the unrecognizable brokenness, when traced out tell a story. A story not defined by how it ends but by the whole of a life. You don't measure a plow by its weathered and haggard exterior but by the story its scars have to tell. They bear witness to a lifetime of showing up, digging in and doing what it was created to do. Every ding, every scratch taken as a whole tells of a graced and messy perseverance. A story of fallow ground broken in a long obedience in the same direction. A journey marked by many little deaths and littered with the tomb stones of abandoned dreams.

But what is the secret of the plow? I think I heard the wind whisper an answer.  A plow unlike people knows it is loved no mater how twisted life makes it. For only a love that embraces the unloveable can open us up to live from the uncluttered acceptance of brokenness. Such love is freedom. It frees us to live unburdened from the unbearable weight of needing to be anything more than what we are. Even if we has been sharpened at the edges by the endless grind of life.

In the end, the plow was twisted and used up but maybe that's what fulfillment feels like sometimes. When you feel spent and poured out. Is that the splendor of being used? I think so. What gets us to the end is not the wishful thinking of one’s youth but a fix hope in God perfected over the long journey. When dreams die, and youthful hopes fade what remains is an unflinching hope, enriched by love, and built on the perseverance of the plow.

Christain Education: Learning the new language of Christianity

"Discipleship is a kind of immigration, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God's beloved Son (Col. 1:13). In Christ we are given a heavenly passport; in his body we learn how to live like "locals" of his kingdom. Such an immigration to a new kingdom isn't just a matter of being teleported to a different realm; we need to be acclimated to a new way of life, learn a new language, acquire new habits--and unlearn the habits of that rival dominion." - James K.A Smith

We all are immigrats. As immigrates learning is a necessary task, if we are to be a part of God's kingdom. This is why education is one way of the church disciples it's members. In Smith's quote he speaks of learning a new language. Such a phrase could be helpful in describing the process of Christain education. But first let us look at how we should understand what is meant by "language".

Language is more than words
Language is more than how human's communicate. It includes conveying information about the weather and other subjects. Yet language also has a social function. It is a means of establishing and maintaning relationships with other people. We share information about a person like what sort of job someone does or what social status they have. Without this information social interaction brakes down.

Beneath the social, language has a much deeper, more primal function. From a subjective stance, language is how we understand the world. The way we speak, the words we use, the syntax and grammar, metaphors and symbols, all coalesce to form how we describe and define the world. In short, language names reality (Gen 2:19-20a).

At this primal level is where language and Christianity intersect. Christain language is the way christain's label the world. It is the outworking of a Christain worldview in everyday descriptions and definitions. Thus learning the language of Christianity, particularly it's theological definitions is a very important enterprise. Such theological definitions form the way we see life by giving context, shape and definition to our lives. Life still has it's ineffable mysteries and perplexing enigmas yet even such darkness is set within a context of God's reign.

Learn a new language is Christian education.
Christain education is like learning a new language. A person's goal is to learn a language so that it becomes second nature. If we are to be really proficient at, say, German, we need to learn to think in German, maybe even dream in German. We reach the point where we can slip easily from one language to another without effort. We learn the idioms of speech of that language; its rules are embedded in our minds so that we do not need to pause to reach for the right mode of expression. It becomes part of us. Christain education is unlearning the world's system (a way of seeing and acting), by learning to define life by God's terms.

Not Christianese
Learning the language of Christianity is not like learning christianese. Christianese is form of Christians jargon. In which one learns to speak as a Christain without understanding much of what is meant. Christianese is a simple way of speaking that lacks substance, clearity, nuances and is generally akin to a first year language student. One uses (and misuses) certain words, theological terms, and catchphrases in everyday conversation often only comprehensible by those in the same group. It is the "pig Latin" of christainity, a novelty, or better a parody of the soul grammar imbedded in Christain truth. The language of Christianity is not how christain's talk but the core content of the faith that frames how we describe and define the world. It is less a way of speaking to the world and more a way of seeing and acting in the world.

Theology as Grammar
As a 'grammar,' theology provides structure to our thinking. It describes how the Christian faith is a special way of speaking and acting which makes sense of human life by giving it meaning, practical definitions, a particular style of life and hope. Learning how to see life by the new language of the kingdom is crucial to learning how to be a Christian.

Our context is community and aim is fluency.
Being fluent in Christianity means that, for the most part, we define life by God's terms. It must be noted at this point, such learning does not happen in a vacuum. The church is the language school and the Scriptures its textbook. Pastors and elders even Sunday school teachers perhaps should be regarded as language instructors and terminology tutors. They all in varying degrees, train us all in the "lingua franca" of Christain thought. More than any the common tongue of the community shapes our vision through the immersion of daily integration.

Example of prayer:
For example; in the context of the church community helping inform our reading. We learn the language of praise by reading and rereading the Psalms, we gain a God given grammar and vocabulary that our praise can inhabit. Worship is set within the daily drama of human life and we learn to see worship as an honest expression of our heart's current GPS. When we learn the language of praise our posture and relationship with God changes. We embody the psalms not in "phrasing" but in a heart unburdened and uncensored before God.


J. Dawson Jarrell

Waiting in the inbetween

Waiting in the inbetween with Bonhoeffer.


A man sits in a cold cell in Tegel Prison. His body weathered like his clothes. He sits hunched over a desk. Pen in hand. The cold air of winter is the only reminder of the joyous season he is in. He is forced wait, to wonder, to think. He thinks about how every letter will be read twice, maybe three times. Once by the guards, once by the Lieutenant assigned to read them, and once by his loved ones to whom he writes. Three witnesses to each word, three opportunities to share, to pastor from a distance, those who God has given him even in his chains. His words are reflective yet disclose a faith, a real faith, raw yet unflinching, ardent but forloned. Every stroke a testemony, every goodbye could be the last. So from the depths of his cell, and from the depths of His waiting, he writes. These are just some of his reflections from those letters:

The Advent season is a season of waiting, but our whole life is an Advent season, that is, a season of waiting for the last Advent, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

We can, and should also, celebrate Christmas despite the ruins around us…I think of you as you now sit together with the children and with all the Advent decorations- as in earlier years you did with us. We must do all this, even more intensively because we do not know how much longer we have.

– Letter to Bonhoeffer’s parents, Nov 29, 1943, from Tegel prison

Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten.. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them. Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting — that is, of hopefully doing without — will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment….

Those who do not know how it feels to struggle anxiously with the deepest question of life, of their life and patiently look forward with anticipation until the truth is revealed, cannot even dream of the spendor of the moment in which clarity is illuminated for them.  And for those who do not want to win the friendship and love of another person — who do not expectantly open up their soul to the soul of the other person, until friendship and love come, until they make their entrance — for such people the deepest blessing of the one like of two intertwined souls will remain forever hidden.

 For the greatest, most profound, tenderest things in the world, we must wait. It happens not here in a storm, but according to the divine laws of sprouting, growing and becoming.

[In this letter Bonhoeffer goes on to console his fiance Maria, while reflecting on the message of Christmas]

…We shall ponder the imcomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand…and then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all of our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.

– Letter to Maria von Wedemeyer from prison, Dec 13, 1943

I like to believe when he finished writing. Bonhoeffe smiled, the kind of smile only faith can produce when surrounded by the cold burn of such a hell as Tegel prison. A rich deep smile that starts in the eyes and ends in the heart. A smile sustained by the truth that God was in the manger, and God is on the throne. A smile that does not hide the frustration of longing. A smile that wins friends even enemies. The kind of smile cultivated during advent and enjoyed at Christmas.

In Him
J. Dawson Jarrell