Wednesday Memo

Hi Five Oakers,

I have a few things I want to share with you.

#1 - Get a recap of the service with highlights of our prayers, readings and songs here.

#2 - Here are your comments from the Communication Cards:

• Great message today – liked the description of purity laws (Jesus fulfilled) and the moral laws (still for today)! 
• Would it be possible to get a bulletin board put up? I have a friend who called me to put up a flyer about a fund raiser, but there was no where to put it. [Not sure if we will, but it’s not on our radar. Thanks.]
• Awesome explanation regarding the purity laws versus the moral laws!
• Fantastic, beautiful worship set. I think “Praise Him”. Hillsong is one of my favorites. And the last song of the opening set was absolutely moving. Thanks for the message!
• I love this series! I am learning so many new ways to think about the word of God. Thank you Henry! Awesome message.
• Justin rocks!
• Henry, great sermon! Love your enthusiasm and passion for God’s word!
• Awesome message and delivery.
• Great message, Henry. Time to put away the ketchup! (and feast on the Word).
• Book of John (life giving Spirit). Epistles of Paul (Fifth Gospel).
• Thank you, Henry, for challenging us, for motivating us and for your directness.
• Thanks for another great message, Henry!
• Henry, thank you for helping me love the Bible and God’s word even more!
• Again lovely analogies Henry. Looking forward to this wonderful breakdown into scripture.
• BSF/Bible Study Fellowship – expository teaching, reading and discussion is this burning/changing in our hearts.- an eight year training course. God’s word is the only thing that can change lives. Thank you for this teaching also at Five Oaks. 
• Been using text giving for past few months. It is slick! Very easy and makes it easy for church to process! [Did Brian Burquest put you up to saying this? Just kidding. Yeah, there are many ways to give and text giving is one of them. Contact the church office if you’d like to know about how to give electronically through withdrawals, by texting or in other ways: office@fiveoakschurch.org.]
• How is it that I can come here upset or angry and always leave at peace and changed? Thank you.
• Prayer for service attendance between services 1-4 graders this week in the CLC: 7 at 4:30, 71 at 9:30 and 19 at 11. [Yes, this is a problem. We are going to change service times on Sunday to accommodate more time between services, but it also might help with this a little.]
• Marriage conference during hunting season? Want to attend, but doesn’t work. [Yeah, bummer. I’m not sure if we could have gotten another date for Rob Rinow to come and do his seminar. We booked him last year and his schedule was already pretty much full. But I do admit, we don’t have any hunters on staff so it’s easy to miss. I’m thinking most non-hunters may not get how important this is to hunters, but I just think of a church scheduling a marriage conference during the Super Bowl since I’m a big NFL fan.]

#3 - Here’s a recap of the message in 10 tweets:

1. Week 2 of “Eat This Book” series based on Luke 18:31-34.
2. If u put ketchup on expensive steak I'll attack you ruthlessly even tho it's unimportant. But how you eat this Book is vitally important.
3. When u read the Bible without carefully listening carefully to what Gos is actually saying you are slathering it in ketchup.
4. Where is this passage located within the unfolding story of God?
5. Most of the Bible story is told w/out clearly revealing the climax in the cross & resurrection. Suffering & glory, yes, but not the details
6. You can't watch the 6th Sense the same the 2nd time. The end reinterprets everything. U see what was really happening all along.
7. I would be inconsistent if I had to keep purity laws & sacrifices of the OT be/ I'm now made pure & right thru Christ's purity & sacrifice
8. Purity laws tied to OT worship. Moral laws based on unchanging character of God. They still reveal how to live reflecting God's image.
9. Tim Keller: “The coming of Christ changed how we worship but it didn't change how we live."
10. Lk 24:32 -"Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?"

#4 - Off the Cutting Room Floor (good stuff that got cut from the message):

You have a basic choice when it comes to the authority of the Bible. You can accept what Jesus and the apostles said about it and therefore let it have authority in your life—shaping what you believe and how you think and how you live. Or you can decide YOU are a higher authority and know best how to sort out truth from fiction in this book. You can pick and choose what you want to believe and what you think is right. But what you can’t do—and really make any sense at all in doing it—is say you believe in Jesus (you follow him as his disciple), but you don’t believe what he believed about the Bible.

If you’re not convinced in the accuracy and authority of the Bible I urge you to explore this question some more and test your assumptions. There are a lot of great resources for this. But it’s from this book that you learn about Jesus and the resurrection. Jesus came from a people of the Book. You really can’t have Jesus without the Book. The Book is part of the package. You take it out and the whole thing falls apart.

Talk to you tomorrow, Pastor Henry

Weekend Message Q&A

Here are the questions I received based on the weekend message.

Q – I've been using a reading plan to read through the Bible for the first time. How do you be attentive while reading from different books in the Bible? I'm using YouVersion app yearlong reading for reference.

A – There are two ways to go about this: (1) Read the Bible several times through until you begin to see the basic story line and can learn to be attentive to where you are in the story whenever you read it; or (2) find a good resource that helps  you get the framework of the Bible story and gets you to read the key passages. I suggest you start with my book because it gives a framework for the whole Bible before you read the whole Bible. If you’ve done that already, then just keep the two acts and 10 scenes in mind whenever you read.

There may be another issue you’re addressing in your question. It’s hard to read attentively when you’re covering a lot of material in one reading. It might be good to combine a yearlong Bible reading program with something like the Group Life study that drills in to a shorter passage of Scripture. A good devotional can help in this way too. If that’s too much, I suggest taking three years to complete the Bible so you have time for reflection.

Another suggestion for getting more out of large passages of the Bible: Wayne Cordiero has his church read through the Bible every year and they use an approach called SOAP. It will help you get more out of your reading. Check it out here.

Q – (1) How do you deal with Christians who insist that the old laws still must be followed in part to prove/justify their hatred? (2) What of those non-believers who point to the marriages in the Bible as being non standardized who argue against the "traditional marriage" view that the right wing are arguing to keep? What do you say to them especially since marriage is not just a Christian/Jewish institution? Sorry if this is a bit vague.

A – I’ll be brief, but you’ve hit on a lot of issues that really require a lot more attention than I can give it here.

(1) I’m never quite sure what to do if I suspect someone is using the Bible to justify their hatred. I have to be careful not to read motives into their words and actions (not to judge), but if hatred is what they are communicating with their words and actions, I have to call it what it is and I may need to call it out. It’s hardest for me to know what to do when it’s an elderly family member or an old friend. That said, the old laws are never old if they express God’s will. So the moral laws of the Bible still express the character and will of God. But they should never be used to hit people over the head, to be self-righteous or to be hateful.

(2) The Bible defines marriage in terms of one man and one woman. Yes, several key people in Bible times married multiple wives (although not as many as you think), but the Bible doesn’t condone it. Nor does it purport to hold these guys up as examples for marriage. The underlying premise of almost every passage is that THIS is the material God worked with—flawed, broken, sucky humans like you and me. God put the standard for marriage out there in Genesis, Jesus and Paul underscore it and the rest of the story records how we mess with his directions. And here’s one thing that becomes clear as the story unfolds: polygamy never works and only makes things worse. This happens in story after story.

Q - In your teaching tonight at service on Saturday 9/22, you mentioned that the new testament has one or more references to the meaning of the animal sacrifices performed in the old testament.  Can you call those out for us in your blog?

If I'm being honest, I'm still unclear as to why the animal sacrifice and ritual cleanliness / uncleanliness is part of the old testament. If the answer was just that people of that time had a different culture or different rituals, then I could accept it (or more accurately, dismiss it), but it seems like these acts were influenced by God and the prophets.  Why would God want his people to do these things? They seem completely foreign to what Jesus asks of his followers in the new testament, and I'm struggling to see the logic behind these specific portions of the old testament.  If this is addressed in great detail in the story of God series, then I will look forward to that.  I'm praying that I can come to some understanding on this topic.

A – The NT book that deals with this most extensively is Hebrews. But this subject really permeates the entire NT. For instance, you can’t fully understand or appreciate the Lord’s Supper without understanding the “cutting” of covenants, the need for bloodshed involved in sacrifice and the original Passover. Likewise, the Gospel of John is written with a focus on Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem during various OT prescribed festivals, and Jesus’ teaching in John ties closely to those festivals and how he is the fulfillment of each one. In addition, only John records the words from John the Baptist about Jesus: “The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” That’s a reference to the sacrificial system and Passover in particular.

The Story of God study deals with the sacrificial system extensively, but not as much with the purity laws.

In actuality, you suggest a lot of this OT purity/ritual stuff is completely foreign to what Jesus taught. I don’t agree at all. It’s preparatory in his teaching. Most of his teaching doesn’t make sense if you ignore the OT. And he never says the OT rituals and such were wrong. In fact, after many of his healings he tells the healed to go and get the proper cleansings and clearances from the priests.

Essentially he does three things consistently when it comes to the ceremonial (purity) laws and the moral laws of the OT: (1) He attacks his contemporaries misunderstandings and abuses of the rituals and laws (including their focus on externals, which the OT did not do; see e.g., Luke 11:42); (2) he deepens their understanding of the laws (as he does in Matthew 5:21-48 regarding several OT laws); and (3) he shows how the laws are fulfilled in him and only by him. There’s more he does, but that’s a start.

One more thing: The exact nature of the rituals were often shaped by God within specific cultures. So, yes, the culture influenced it. If you keep in mind that culture includes language, you see that the whole Bible (literally every word) is conditioned by the culture in which it was revealed and delivered. But there is no other way of doing it. You can’t communicate with anyone outside of culture and time. And the Bible is self-aware of this fact.

So if you easily dismiss anything that is conditioned in some way by the culture, you’ll have to dismiss the entire NT as well. It’s also filled with weird things from our cultural perspective. Theologians speak of things in Scripture that are indeed culturally conditioned (and therefore not binding) and those that are transculturally normative (they apply in any culture even though they are given in a particular culture's language and thought patterns). Think, for instance, of the command to love your neighbor as yourself. The exact meaning of that in the OT referred to loving fellow Israelites. I might be tempted to dismiss it as culturally irrelevant since I’m not an Israelite, or I can see what is clearly there: a love ethic for my life as well. Of course, this isn’t the only passage that talks about love in the Bible either. So as I read the whole Bible it becomes even clearer that this is a central, transculturally normative command.

On the other hand, when it says “greet one another with a holy kiss” there is nothing in the text or the whole Bible to suggest this is transculturally normative. Kissing isn't portrayed as central to the character of God revealed in the Bible or central to the great commandment.  But we do know that this was the common way of greeting each other in Paul’s culture. If you're not sure about this and decide to greet me with a holy kiss, go to youtube and search "will smith slaps reporter." Let that be your warning. :-)

There’s a great chapter on this in a book I highly recommend: How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart. Great book by two former professors of mine.