Weekend Messages: From Believer/Seeker to Gospel Saturation

(This is one in a series of posts I started here.)

Again, I don't want to make too much of this contrast. It's subtle, but I've gone from thinking of my messages and our worship services as targeting believes but seeker sensitive to simply being services that are saturated with the gospel. The idea is that people far from God and followers of Christ have the same need--the Gospel.

The person far from God needs to understand and receive the Gospel message. But the follower of Christ needs the Gospel every day and needs to go deeper and deeper into the reality and meaning of the Gospel. As Tim Keller is fond of saying, the Gospel is the not the A,B,C's of Christianity; it's the A to Z.

So the clearer we are when we explain and teach and illustrate how the Bible story (whatever part we're studying on any given week) relates to Christ and the Gospel, the greater the likelihood that people far from God will draw nearer and those who follow Christ will go deeper.

Audio of Award-winning Bonhoeffer on Sale!

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxis. It's one of the best biographies I've ever read and it's on sale for only $9.98 through the end of the month at ChristianAudio.com. It recently was awarded the 2011 Evangelical Christian Publisher's Association Book of the Year. This is a great deal.

Here's the description.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Amazing Grace, this is a groundbreaking biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, the man who stood up to Hitler. A definitive, deeply moving narrative, Bonhoeffer is a story of moral courage in the face of the monstrous evil that was Nazism.

After discovering the fire of true faith in a Harlem church, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany and became one of the first to speak out against Hitler. As a double agent, he joined the plot to assassinate the Führer and was hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp at age thirty-nine. Since his death, Bonhoeffer has grown to be one of the most fascinating, complex figures of the twentieth century.

Bonhoeffer presents a profoundly orthodox Christian theologian whose faith led him to boldly confront the greatest evil of the twentieth century and uncovers never-before-revealed facts, including the story of his passionate romance.