One More Thing

Hi Five Oakers, The weekend is just about here and there are a few things I want to share with you.

The Weekend

Dan Lukas is preaching this weekend in our 2 Samuel series, focusing on chapters 13-15. We've been talking about his sermon all week and I can't wait to hear it. Here's what he says about it:

David steals another man’s wife. David's son rapes his sister. David plots and murders to coverup his sin. David’s other son plots and murders to avenge his sisters rape. David’s sin has given birth to more sin and everything around him is spiraling dangerously out of control.

The consequences of sin are real and frightening, and we are foolish if gloss over them. This weekend we’ll take a hard look at sin, it’s consequences and God’s grace for us. We’ll use David’s life as a starting point to examine our own lives; to see our sin and remember how to let God’s mercy and grace heal our broken lives. It’s crucial we learn how to let God restore us from our sin. I can’t wait to share with each of you what I sense God has taught me in David’s story yet again.

FYI

Russell Moore on "The Opportunity to Be Sojourners and Strangers: We don't have Mayberry anymore, if we ever did. Good. Mayberry can lead to hell just as surely as Gomorrah does"

It's precisely these headwinds of cultural change that afford evangelicals the opportunity to be what the Bible says we are: Sojourners and strangers. When we cannot comfortably assume that our neighbors agree with us about the good life, we are forced to articulate the Gospel.

Logan Gentry on "The Only Way to Make Disciples"

Discipleship has often been viewed as an up-and-to-the-right straight process of successful growth, but discipleship is way messier than that, involves setbacks, patience, and a belief in the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ to overcome every sin, struggle, and trial. The only way we will make actual disciples of Jesus instead of religious look-alikes is to embrace the mess, get dirty ourselves, and push through the mud to model Jesus’ incarnation.

Francie Winslow on "My Journey to Seeing the Goodness of God in the Gift of Sex: A Theology of Sex and Parenting"

Although I grew up in the Bible belt and was deeply involved in church, I crossed the threshold of marriage without a clear understanding of how to positively approach sex. Sex was more of a dirty duty than a divine gift. I lacked a theology of sexuality and as a result, my understanding of the value of sex was disjointed.One More Thing

One More Thing

Here's the Eugene Peterson quote from last weekend's sermon.

The basic, fundamental condition of our humanity is God. We’re created by God. We’re redeemed by God. We’re blessed by God. We’re provided for by God. We're loved by God. Sin is the denial or ignorance or avoidance of that basic condition. Sin is the word we use to designate the perverseness of will by which we attempt being our own gods, or making for ourselves other gods. Sin isn't essentially a moral term, designating items of wrongdoing; it's a spiritual term, designating our God–avoidance and our god–pretensions. (From Leap Over a Wall)

One More Thing

Hi Five Oakers, The weekend is almost here and I want to share a few things with you.

The Weekend

Illicit sex, multiple murders, an elaborate cover-up, callous betrayal, and self-righteous indignation all perpetrated by the man after God's own heart. That's our text this weekend: 2 Samuel 11-12.

Jewish literary scholar, Robert Alter, says the literary artistry in telling the story of David and Bathsheba is unequaled in ancient literature. Another scholar, Walter Brueggemann, writes, "The story is so massive and penetrating that it almost defies our capacity to interpret. Every effort fails before the subject itself, no doubt the way interpretation fails all great art."

What does a preacher do with a text like this? The answer: Get out of the way as much as possible and let the Scripture speak for itself.

FYI

Joshua Reich on "When Grace Isn’t What You Expected"

I’m reading The Wilderking Trilogy to my kids, which is based on the life of King David. There is a great line in the second book where the prophet describes King Darrow (representing King Saul), and he says about him, “He’s thrown away the grace he was given because it’s not the grace he had in mind.”

Mark Galli on "Hope in the Face of Intractable Racism: The church provides two gifts to the conversation on race"

Only by acknowledging the hopelessness of eradicating sin can we avoid despair. Ennobled by honest confession, empowered by a sure forgiveness, we can abandon utopian hopes and instead focus on more modest and achievable ends: ensuring that the worst expressions of racism are checked, and a creating a church in which blacks and whites enjoy a measure of reconciliation.

One More Thing

Here's the Hugh Halter quote in full from last week's sermon:

To truly appreciate what Jesus’s incarnation means to us, we have to ask the why. Why did God come to earth? Why did He go through all the trouble? Why didn’t He just forget about humanity, let it go, and start over? Why would He let His Son not only come to us but also die in the process? If you have grown up with Christian theology, you know that a perfect, holy God cannot let imperfection, or what we call “sin,” have the last laugh. Because God is in His nature both perfect in love and perfect in justice, He needed a way to remove sin from humanity so that humans could be back in relationship with Him. The only payment, or what we call “atonement,” for sin is someone without sin dying in the place of those who do sin. The only option therefore was God’s sinless Son in place of us, sinful humanity.

That makes sense at least as an equation for why God had to come and die. But the incarnation isn’t just about an equation. It’s about an emotion. God wanted us back. He wanted it the way it used to be. (Hugh Halter, Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth)