Spurgeon’s Standards for Conversion and Church Membership

The following is an excerpt from a new book by Tom Nettles Living for Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon  as posted by Jeremy Walker at blogsite Reformation 21.

          “Spurgeon was adamant that the door to the church be well-guarded, and had a carefully-developed system whereby converts applying for membership were graciously but robustly assessed by elders, himself, and the whole congregation.”

          “At two separate points in the book, Nettles shows how - at times of particular evangelistic endeavour, as well as during the more regular procedures of church life - the saints were encouraged to make a thoughtful and scriptural assessment of a man's standing with God and prospective relationship with the local church.”

          “Perhaps, in our day, we are not always sure what we should be looking for in the heart and life of men and women who profess faith in the Lord Jesus. Far too many churches, perhaps feeling the pressure of numbers or some other force, are inclined to drop their standards or blur their distinctions, if they have them in the first place. In the face of that, these standards seem to me to be thoroughly biblical, genuinely gracious, and appropriately robust. They combine doctrinal understanding, experimental religion, and principled obedience - a religion of head, heart and hand, if you will. If more congregations embraced a righteous assessment of this sort with regard to professing converts and applicants for membership, I am persuaded that they would be spiritually healthier places than they too often are.”

 

Originally posted on January 9, 2014 by Jeremy Walker

Read the entire article at http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2014/01/spurgeons-standards-for-conver.php

The Soil of the Prosperity Gospel

While the prosperity gospel comes packaged in a number of different forms—Word of Faith, Positive Confession, and so on—the core product is consistent. At its heart is the conviction that human words and faith shape reality. We are empowered to speak life into being, but regrettably few of us are aware of this great privilege. The reason we do not have the financial security, health, and success we want is that we do not call it forth and draw it unto ourselves. Beneath this claim rests a high anthropology, which regards human beings as fundamentally good and ultimately powerful.

One need not look far to see that this message has resonated with a massive audience, both in the United States and abroad. Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn—the list of celebrity prosperity preachers is seemingly endless, with many of them broadcasting on TBN. These preachers hawk their television ministries, books, podcasts, CDs, and retreats to hungry consumers eager to find out how they can maximize their potential to live a life of fullness and well-being, to “break out” of the desperation of broken dreams and dashed hopes (as Osteen’s latest book instructs).

It is a tempting and intoxicating brew, appealing to basic human inclinations and culturally conditioned desires, offering a quick high but a nasty hangover. And it’s extremely lucrative for its purveyors, since one of the principal ways to demonstrate faith is to sow financial seeds, which is to say, give gifts to prosperity preachers or purchase their products. The resulting fleets of luxury automobiles, massive homes, and Italian suits might strike critics as garish, but prosperity preachers retort with a smile that their lives and bank accounts merely verify the truth of their messages.

How did we get to a place where such a clearly debased form of Christianity holds sway with so many people?

Read the entire enlightening article HERE.

Article posted by Jonathan Baer on December 20, 2013.

Jonathan Baer is an associate professor of religion at Wabash College and a deacon at First Christian Church in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

http://www.9marks.org/blog/soil-prosperity-gospel

Pluck the I out of your iPhone

The advent of smart phones has introduced an unprecedented rate of interruption into our social interactions. Phones have made us selfish and inconsiderate in ways that used to be deemed boorish and uncultured.

Formerly, if someone walked up to you and began talking while you were already engaged in another conversation, that person would be considered rude.

But this decade has made us feel rude for not replying instantly to any interruption that hails from our phone.

You know how frustrating it is to be halted mid-sentence by a text chime tone, only to have the person you were talking with treat the “What’s up?” ping as if it were a life-and-death enquiry. I understand if Jack Bauer asked me to hold my thought while he checked the text message from the President. But very few people work for CTU or are on call to intercept a terrorist attack.

Most people answer their phones for one reason only: they heard it “Ping.” How Pavlovian can you get?

Consider just how inconsiderate and demeaning it is to peer intently into a screen, while the person in front of your face is still talking to you.

And even if the message is from an important source for a truly urgent reason, surely we owe it to whomever we are conversing with to let them finish their thought, or otherwise excuse ourselves with an explanation of why this intruder is legitimately more important than they are.

I believe this is becoming an area in which Christians can witness and set an example. Personally, I am going to resolve this new year to not allow my phone to make me behave inconsiderately to those I love.

By the way, I once rejected a phone call during a family dinner. Do you know what happened? Nothing. Go figure. Apparently my availability is not as critical to national security as Jack Bauer’s. 

Phillipians  2:3b  … in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.

Excerpted from “4 Godly Disciplines Unique to this Decade” posted on December 30, 2013 at “The Cripplegate” by Clint Archer.  For the complete article see http://thecripplegate.com/4-godly-disciplines-unique-to-this-decade

The Sovereignty of God and the Possible

I don’t know how people pray who don’t believe in the sovereignty of God to do the impossible. Because all the things I want to happen are impossible. If they’re possible I’ll do them.

Pastor John Piper

http://jamsco.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/john-piper-good-quotes-part-6/

Creeds and Confessions - Quotations

At the New England Reformed Fellowship’s annual Bolton Conference (held Oct. 25-26, 2013) Carl Trueman spoke on the topic the role of creeds and confessions in the church.  Here is some of what he had to say:

“Scripture is the norming norm, creeds are the normed norm.” Scripture is always our ultimate authority – but we can still say that creeds are a church’s normative doctrines and practices, because they were created from Scripture. In that sense, creeds have authority.

“If you don’t write your creeds, no one can critique them. Creeds strip us of magisterial authority.” Despite common misconceptions, creeds actually dis-empower pastors from a form of papal authority. Creeds lay out the church’s stances on scripture and a.) Let everyone search the scriptures and evaluate the pastor’s stance and b.) Keep the pastor from imposing personal preferences (Don’t smoke, or chew, or run with those who do, etc.) Saying “No creed but the Bible” makes the pastor king of interpretation.

“Notice – no creed has the words ‘we just’” Trueman was taking a jab at the lack of thought we often put into our prayers – the words “we just” don’t make their way into a thought through confession, nor someone who is praying with depth of belief based on rich tradition.

“We all operate from a tradition, whether we acknowledge it or not. Some write it down, others don’t.” Every pastor I’ve ever known who is against creeds uses an English Bible – which means their beliefs are founded on a lexical, textual tradition. They would also take issue with other faiths who claim the Bible as creed, like Mormons or Muslims. The difference is, some of us make this tradition clear by writing it out, and others don’t.

Carl R Trueman is Departmental Chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. He is editor of the IFES journal, Themelios, and has taught on the faculties of theology at both the University of Nottingham and the University of Aberdeen.

Excerpted from http://scribblepreach.com/2013/10/29/carl-truemans-top-10-quotes-on-creeds-and-confessions/

The Importance of Expositional Preaching.

Subtitle: Why Are Some Churches Spiritually Ill?  Maybe it’s the Food….

By food, I mean the analogy used in scripture indicating the Word of God.   Perhaps some spiritual illness we see today can be traced to the pulpit or to the congregational ambivalence towards the preached Word.  An antidote to spiritual illness in a church is most always connected to worship and the faithful exposition of the Word of God.

However, there seems to be a tendency in some churches to avoid expositional preaching.  By expositional preaching I mean that preaching which begins with the preachers determination to present, explain, and apply the text of the Bible to his congregation. 

As Dr. Al Mohler has stated, “expository preaching begins with the text and works from the text to apply its truth to the lives of believers. If this determination and this commitment are not clear at the outset, something other than expository preaching will result. The preacher rises in the pulpit to accomplish one central purpose: to set forth the message and meaning of the biblical text….Once the meaning of the text is set forth, the preacher moves to application. Application of biblical truth is a necessary task of expository preaching.”

T. H. L. Parker (Professor Emeritus at Oxford, U.K.) describes preaching like this: “Expository preaching consists in the explanation and application of a passage of Scripture. Without explanation it is not expository; without application it is not preaching.”

The Q & A portion of the 9Marks website outlines expositional preaching this way:

An expositional sermon is a sermon that takes the main point of a passage of Scripture, makes it the main point of the sermon, and applies it to life today.

In other words, an expositional sermon exposes the meaning of a passage of Scripture and shows its relevance to the lives of one’s hearers. That’s it.

This means that an expositional sermon does NOT

1.     Need to focus on just a verse or two.

2.     Need to present complex exegetical arguments or endless historical background.

3.     Need to be dry, lifeless, or removed from people’s lives.

4.     Confuse the primary point of a passage with any legitimate application of that passage (that is, use a verse to say what you want to say).

Dr. Mohler again writes, “….in many churches there is very little reading of the Bible in worship, and sermons are marked by attention to the congregation’s concerns, not by an adequate attention to the biblical text. The exposition of the Bible has given way to the concerns, real or perceived, of the listeners  The authority of the Bible is swallowed up in the imposed authority of congregational concerns.

In many churches, there is almost no public reading of the Word of God. Worship is filled with music, but congregations seem disinterested in listening to the reading of the Bible. We are called to sing in worship, but the congregation cannot live only on the portions of Scripture that are woven into songs and hymns. Christians need the ministry of the Word as the Bible is read before the congregation such that God’s people—young and old, rich and poor, married and unmarried, sick and well—hear it together. The sermon is to consist of the exposition of the Word of God, powerfully and faithfully read, explained, and applied. It is not enough that the sermon take a biblical text as its starting point.

How can so many of today’s churches demonstrate what can only be described as an impatience with the Word of God? The biblical formula is clear: the neglect of the Word can only lead to disaster, disobedience, and death. God rescues his church from error, preserves his church in truth, and propels his church in witness only by his Word—not by congregational self-study.”

This may explain why some Christians and some churches struggle in worship and are therefore spiritually malnourished.

 

http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/10/14/falling-on-deaf-ears-why-so-many-churches-hear-so-little-of-the-bible-2/

http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/08/21/the-sheer-weightlessness-of-so-many-sermons-why-expository-preaching-matters/

http://www.9marks.org/answers/what-%E2%80%9Cexpositional%E2%80%9D-sermon

Evangelism....what it is and isn't

The Christian call to evangelism is a call not simply to persuade people to make decisions but rather to proclaim to them the good news of salvation in Christ, to call them to repentance, and to give God the glory for regeneration and conversion. We don’t fail in our evangelism if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not converted; we fail only if we don’t faithfully tell the gospel at all. Evangelism itself isn’t converting people; it’s telling them that they need to be converted and telling them how they can be.

Mark Dever is Senior Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and founder of 9Marks Ministries.