In a previous post, we introduced you to Rachel Barkey, a fellow Vancouver-ite attending Westside Church, who has an amazing testimony of God’s goodness to her, even in her battle with cancer. Well, that battle is now over and she is home with her Lord – free of suffering and tears. Thank God she did not waste her cancer! O God, may we too, like Rachel, die well – dying like death is gain (Phil 1:21).
Archive for the ‘Gospel’ Category
Rachel Barkey: Home with Jesus
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009Death is Not Dying: Rachel’s Story
Friday, May 29th, 2009Rachel Barkey is dying. This 37 year old wife and mother of two has been diagnosed with terminal cancer that has spread to her liver, bones, and skull. But this is not the end for Rachel. For Rachel, death is not dying but the beginning of true life everlasting. Hear her powerful testimony as she shares the Gospel and how it intersects with her story to a group of women in Vancouver.
Death is Not Dying: A Faith that Saves
She is a member of our fellow Gospel-loving, Gospel-preaching church on the westside of Vancouver, Westside Church.
Missing from the Prosperity Gospel Tract
Sunday, April 19th, 2009You might have seen this picture floating around the web. Funny yet gravely serious.
HT: The Contemporary Calvinist
A Conversation with Death
Monday, April 13th, 2009In Barton’s Easter sermon, he noted how our culture tend to avoid the topic of death. Death is “awkward and hard to face. But not for the Christian. The Christian can look death straight in the eye and not look away.”
And more so, we can talk directly and boldly to Death. John Piper describes a Christian’s conversation with Death.
The Point of the Gospel: Jesus Wants the Rose
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009Matt Chandler was a speaker at the most recent Desiring God Pastor’s conference, and he gave a powerful illustration of how the gospel is for broken sinners. You can find a transcript and a link to the rest of the message on the DG site.
On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ
Monday, April 6th, 2009On Palm Sunday, Barton preached a powerful message on the cross, taking time to explain the gruesome nature of a Roman crucifixion. He referenced a well-known study by The Journal of the American Medical Association called “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ“. It considers the death of Jesus from a historical and medical standpoint.
The way Barton described Jesus’ Passion was graphic and gut-wrenching. Some might question the need to talk in such awful detail. But such preaching is necessary. Why?
Because the gruesomeness of Jesus’ suffering and death most fully exposes the true horror of sin and the punishment it deserves. And more than that, his brutal suffering and death most fully demonstrates the justice of God and the abounding love he has for sinners like you and me!
The Failure of a Christ-less Christianity
Thursday, February 19th, 2009In the past month, we’ve begun a sermon series on the book of 1 Timothy (forgive the tardiness in our postings). This clip from the TV series E.R. was mentioned in Barton’s sermon on “Guard the Truth” (1:1-11).
It is a perfect illustration of the absolute failure of Christ-less Christianity. That is, any form of self-help spirituality that tries to pass off as Christianity but is devoid of any absolutes regarding sin, judgment, hell, grace, the cross, forgiveness, eternal life. In the end, it has nothing substantial to offer dying sinners (and I don’t just mean those on their deathbeds).
Now the show tries to explain away the dying man’s demand for absolutes as the typical reaction of those in “crisis situations”. Notice how the chaplain says, “People in crisis want rules, structures, something to lean on.” The implication is that we should expect desperate or dying people to want religious certainties and absolutes. Because they’re distraught, they crave for simple straightforward answers to assuage their guilt or ease their fears. But normal, healthy individuals should know better.
But in Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis argues that when you are the most desperate, you are acting the most yourself. He writes, “Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly.“
His point is that what you feel in your gut when you’re at your most desperate is the best indication of what you truly believe – what you truly want. So the fact that all of us want absolutes and certainties when we’re facing death, suggests that all of us deep down have an innate sense that moral absolutes do exist, that we’ve fallen short of them, and that we need forgiveness from the moral lawgiver.
Footnote: Yes, that is Michelle from 24!
Keller on the Parable of the Two Lost Sons
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009In Tim Keller’s recent book, The Prodigal God, he suggest that the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11-32) should be more accurately called the Parable of the Two Lost Sons because both sons in the story were equally lost – just in different ways. The younger son represented “the tax collectors and sinners” (15:1) who rebelled from God by breaking his law. But the elder son represented “the Pharisees and the scribes” (15:2) who rebelled by keeping all of God’s laws.
That Jesus would accuse morally fastidious, religious people of rebellion was quite shocking – then and now. But Keller argues that Jesus’ parable redefines sin for us. Sin is not just rule-breaking. Sin is dethroning God from the seat of authority in your life. And there are two ways to go about that.
Keller writes, “The hearts of the two brothers were the same. Both sons resented their father’s authority and sought ways of getting our from under it. They each wanted to get into a position in which they could tell the father what to do. Each one, in other words, rebelled – but one did so by being very bad and the other by being extremely good. Both were alienated from the father’s heart; both were lost sons.”
So both sons were sinning against their father. It’s just that one son’s sin was more obvious. And that’s where the danger lies for “elder brother” type individuals. It is very easy for religious people to lose sight of their own lostness when they’re only comparing themselves to “younger brother” types. This Parable forces religious people to ask themselves, “Why do I pursue morality? For the sake of love for God and others? Or for the sake of self – to leverage God and merit his favor?”
Keller writes, “Religious people commonly live very moral lives, but their goal is to get leverage over God, to control him, to put him in a position where they think he owes them. . . . If, like the elder brother, you seek to control God through your obedience, then all your morality is just a way to use God to make him give you the things in life you really want.“
So what do we really want? God himself? Or just what he can give us (ie. an inheritance)? Both sons wanted the inheritance more than the father. It’s just that one son repented and joined his father’s feast while the other stayed outside, wallowing in self-pity and bitterness.
This is Keller’s summary: “Here, then, is Jesus’ radical redefinition of what is wrong with us. Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehavior can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.”
Mohler on The Apostle’s Creed
Monday, December 8th, 2008Our last few posts have focused on the Trinity, and providentially, Justin Taylor recently posted the audio from Al Mohler’s (President of Southern Baptist Seminary) chapel messages on the Apostle’s Creed:
- Credo: I Believe
- God the Father Almighty
- Maker of Heaven and Earth
- Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord
- Conceived of the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary
- Suffered Under Pontius Pilate
- Was Crucified, Died, and Was Buried
- The Third Day He Arose Again from the Dead
- He Ascended into Heaven and Sitteth on the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty
- Whence He Shall Come to Judge the Living and the Dead
- The Holy Spirit
- The Holy Catholic Church and the Communion of the Saints
- The Forgiveness of Sins
- The Resurrection of the Body and Life Everlasting
Sinning Yourself into Bondage and out of Comfort
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008Can Christ’s freemen (Christians) sin themselves into bondage again? That is the question Bolton tackles in a chapter of The True Bounds of Christian Freedom that he calls “Partial Bondage”.
He first argues that Christians can never sin themselves into “universal bondage”, that is, a bondage to sin, to Satan, and to the curse of the law. But it is possible for Christians to sin themselves into “partial bondage”. And one form of partial bondage is to sin yourself out of comfort.
Losing spiritual comfort and internal peace as a result of sin is a form of partial bondage. The gist of Boltons’s argument is that “Though a believer cannot sin away grace, yet he may sin away the evidence, the sense, the comfort of it.”
He offers a helpful distinction between a peace of conscience and peace with conscience. He write, “Just as wicked men may have peace with conscience but no peace of conscience, so the godly may have peace of conscience, but not peace with conscience.”
Other helpful distinctions are between “real peace vs. enjoyed peace” or “the peace of justification vs. the peace from justification”. In either case, “The former remains inviolate and uninterrupted, even when the soul neither sees nor feels its usual consolations, but the latter may be interrupted and disturbed by our manner of walk.”
Bolton then ends with another great distinction between the foundation of a Christian’s peace and the flourishing of a Christian’s peace. “In a word, I conceive that we may distinguish between the foundation and being of a Christian’s peace and the flourishing and well-being of it. The foundation of our Christian peace is not in us but in Christ, not in our holiness but in His righteousness, not in our walking but in His blood and suffering. . . . But the flourishing and well-being of this peace much depends upon the exercise of our graces (spiritual disciplines) and our exact walking with God. It is a peace purchased for us by the obedience of another, but it must be cherished by our own obedience.”
So though our peace with God is secured forever in Christ, Christians must walk in obedience to God and in communion with God to presently enjoy the comfort of that peace.