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For some reason, the word obedience has a hard time in todays society. Most people, I should imagine, on hearing the word would be put off imedieatly whatever was being discussed. Obedience implies submission (another ‘dirty word’) which implies authority (just usinig the ‘a’ word today probably gives this post an 18 certificate) and as a result is something to be scoffed at by today’s postmoderistical outlook.

But what’s interesting for me is the central role obedience should play in our Christian lives. Last Wednesday I took the final installment in what seems like a marathon of Bible studies (which have lasted since last September) on the ‘Sermon on the Mount.’

Jesus really hit it home for me how much obedience should be a normal part of our Christian lives, if not a key part. And it got me thinking. Essentially sin is disobedience, that’s the problem! Essentially what seperated Jesus from every other human that’s lived was…obedience, he did, always, the will of the Father.

When Jesus says on the day of judgement, “Away from me I never knew you.” We should all be on the recieving end, becuase anyone who doesn’t obey the will of the Father, no matter what they say or do, is actually a reject.

If you’ve ever read the sermon on the mount hopefully you’ve realised that this obedience malarky is impossible for you or I. Jesus knew this and that’s why his first beattitude was “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Luckily, because of the Saviour Jesus was, we don’t get judged on that final day as to whether we are obedient or not because Christ was, more so than we could ever be. BUT, now we are saved, the Sermon becomes an example of obedience that the Spirit is working in us to achieve (it’s called sanctifictaion).

how do you measure spiritual growth? I’m going to venture it’s by obedience to the will of the one who sent Him.

So, the good wife and I have returned from the University of Warwick Christian Unions annual ‘mission week’. I was informed while I was there that it was my 6th consecutive mission at Warwick (4 as a student, the last to as an “Assistant Missioner” Next year I’m determined to get us T-Shirts which say, “I A.M.”…too far?)

Anyway, back to the point in hand. This year’s mission was branded, “Priceless” to see the website with all the info go here (it really was well put together). The buzz phrase they were banding around in advertising it was, “It may be free but it wasn’t cheap” (a big golden star whoever lets me know where they stole that from, it’s far too clever for the Oxbridge rejects that congregate at Warwick).

Something different happened this year, we got payed to be A.M’s. Payed? It was after all only a token amount, but why on earth should we get payed? (For the record I didn’t raise this at the time, I took the money and ran). After my very first conversation with someone about the gospel I thought to myself, “I should be paying them to allow me this opportunity to obey and serve God!”

Pile on top of this Lewis’ reasonably inspiring story of the girl on the bus, it got me thinking, could we ever put a price on sharing the gospel with someone? How about a price on getting along side and already christian whose struggling at Uni and encouraging them to fight the fight and stand up for Jesus? How about getting along side a fired up Christian and spurring them on to not just a Uni life with Jesus, but the rest of their lives serving Him, becoming increasingly satisfied in him?

The week really was priceless, for me, for the CU, for the people who heard the gospel for the first, second, hundredth time! And why? Because the gospel is priceless!!! And any work done in that framework must be priceless too!

Some one challenged me recently that not enough of what goes on at proGnosis (and the rest of the Christian blogging world) was very positive. As in, “An awful lot of what you guys write about is, ‘the problem with this is…’”

Actually I thought it was a fair point, a lot of what we write about is in that vain (although I still reckon if you trawl our archives there’s a lot of positive posts, my series on reasonable faith for example).

Anywho, I thought I’d take the time to share some guys who’ve been a real positive influence on us here at proGnosis and can hopefully be a positive influence on you guys.

I’ll start off with the preacher whose probably impacted me most over the last year, Mark Driscoll. You can download all his sermons, audio or video, from the Mars Hill Seattle site. What’s most evident with Mark is his passion and ability to preach the gospel and be enjoying it.

I know a lot of the guys also listen to Tim Keller over at redeemer Church. Carson loves him and so does proGnosis. A very good communicator with some great takes on scripture and culture.

Then there’s those over at Sovereign Grace. JT is a big fan of them, maybe he can fill you in as to how they are a help to him.

John Piper is always a good one to mention, I think you get his stuff through the Desiring God website.

Which preachers, authors or theologians are helping you at the minute and why?

So it’s 2008, year of the Beijing Olympics, Liverpool’s first ever Premiership title and the time for all sorts of new resolutions and new starts.

It’s wonderful isn’t it, 2008 offers us all a clean slate and a chance to really focus the mind on making the changes in our lives we’ve been to afraid to make in 2007. But how should the Christian view it?

Well I think that New Years is a bit like the Gospel. Gasp, what could I mean? People, in general, view it as a chance to start afresh, the Gospel tells us that we have fresh lives in Christ. People view it as a chance to persue their dreams with renewed vigor, the Gospel tells us to turn around and run toward Jesus.

CJ Mahany’s “Cross Centred Life” (a great quick read) remined me that the gospel is for every day, not just for Sundays, not just for Easter or Christmas or New Years, every single day.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth, are that every day for the Christian should be a very merry little ‘new year.’ Every day should start with the knowledge that we have a ‘clean slate’ a renewal in our minds that God’s Grace and Christ’s Sacrifice are sufficent to cover yesterdays transgressions. Every day should start with a new resolve to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbours in the same way we love ourselves. Jesus IS for Christmas, Jesus IS for New Year, but much better than that is that Jesus IS for everyday, we’d be fools to leave Him be!

Some people may be more aware than others, but we also have an account over at youtube. If you don’t know, youtube is a cool new site all the kids are going crazy about where you can upload your own videos (time limit of 10min) and where other people can view them, all completly free.

So if you enjoy Youtube, check us out, we’re proGnosisvideos, and we’ve got a few things up there.

Most recently is a set of ‘dramatic readings’ of Titus. There’s also interviews with World renowned preacher Kevin Adams, UCCF’s (and now WAG) Alison Williams and a few tit bits from our authors. These interviews were conducted during the UCCF summer mission in Ammanford. There’s more to go up but I haven’t edited them all yet.

Let us know what you think, especially with the reading, I know some people love them some people hate them.

So, the last week or so have seem some pretty serious discussion here on prognosis. I for one think it’s been great. Great to engage, great to thrash out, great to come out with a reasonably ‘united’ view on a topic.

But something has been puzzeling me. While we’ve been dancing around this topic of closessness, and at points made good case that it is misleading terminology for a Biblical concept (maturity), we’ve not actually tackled what it is we’ve been dancing round.

Lets go back, way back, to my post on the book Reveal. My real suprise was that it suggested the Church wasn’t the best place for ‘maturing’ the already mature*. Naturally this caused me to ask a few questions:

1) How exactlly do we catogerise the varying levels of maturity in our Church
2) As leaders how do we identify “where people are at”
3) Do we tailor things to differing levels of maturity at all or simply assume one size should fit all.

Martin (Downes) will probably have some thinsg to say about this (he did in the original post, his thoughts are good thoughts check them out) and so should the rest of us, it’s a big issue.

Let’s dive in and learn from the collective wisdom that is prognosis! (Hopefully we’ll learn from scripture rather than the feeble musings we bring)

*I think what was being implied in the book was that Churches weren’t good at it, rather than Churches not being the place where it should be done. This isn’t saying people outgrow Church, rather how we do Church doesn’t grow with people.

This year, working in the Church, I noticed a lot more anti-Halloweenism from Christians. I had to ask myself the question…why?

Last Friday I had the joy of working in the local EMW bookshop where to my horror (get it, Halloween, horror, never mind) I saw a stack of pamphlets, “Trick or treat and go straight to hell!” (that wasn’t the title but it was the gist). The pamphlets were out for people to take, but what’s more worrying is that they were trying to be ‘evangelistic’. Apparently crazy middle ages people started Halloween because they thought they needed protection from evil spirits on the 31st of October…therefore dressing up today meant you were either a witch (there was a warning that real witches DO exist today in Britain) or a Satan worshiper. Either way you had to stop and be saved by Jesus.

Oh dear me. How on earth do we think people are going to respond to that! Probably about as well as I do when I receive a free “Watch Tower” with all it’s Christmas, Easter and Birthday bashing*. I think it’s a little bit sad and quite a lot scary.

Let’s please be honest, Halloween is no longer about keeping evil spirits at bay, it’s about sweets. Lots and lots of sweets, and some chocolate too, and an excuse to go out and get a little bit drunk (the degrees to which the various aspects to that last statement are true depended upon the individual).

Let’s not forget Christmas used to be about celebrating the coming of our God and saviour Jesus Christ, it isn’t anymore, not even among most Evangelicals and their families, but that doesn’t mean we go around like kill joys telling people who have no idea what it’s about not to celebrate it.

All I’m after is a bit of common sense. Most of what happens in terms about boycotting Halloween has got more to do with having a large stick up our asses than it does our religious (and more importantly moral) convictions.

My kids are going to love Halloween because their going to get shed loads of chocolate just like their old man. My responsibility is not to make them weird outcasts in the playground, it’s to tell them about Christ (and possibly to make sure to sticks go near my bottom). And if anyone posts with the words “Hallelujah Party” I’m going to punch them in the face!

*Apparently it’s evil to celebrate Christmas and Easter because they were brought in to replace Pagan holidays and celebrating birthdays is bad as well because all that’s happened is the Earth has gone round the Sun. Obviously I think the first two are ridiculous but with Birthdays I quite agree.

So, last week I finished reading the latest offering from those guys (and gals) over at Willow Creek. A snazy, shiny, skinny (I liked that bit) book called ‘Reveal.‘ Supposedly a book which analyses data collected by the church over a period of 4 years and getting a few million data points, the cover claims that;

(Emphasies mine)

The thing is, all it really did was highlight what we should all already know. For instance, they ‘discovered’ that spiritual growth doesn’t depend on church participation but Closeness to Christ. My alarm was at their alarm!!!

“Hold on?!?!” I’m thinking, “How exactly did you expect to measure spiritual growth?” The answer smacked of the obvious, “The closer people were to Chrsit the more spiritually mature they were.” Well, um, durh!

Secondly they were alarmed that as closeness to Christ increased so did spiritual practices such as tithing, Bible reading, prayer and witness……. and the shocking truth lies where?

I think it smacks of the comsumer driven chruch we seem to be creating. Where we expect attendance to be the yard stick and are suprised when Jesus shows up in the process.

Check out the book, hopefully it’ll just confirm what you already knew, if not then that’s what’s shocking.

“Oh, hi Sammy, how are you? Are you the new Youth Worker at AEC?” What you have just read is one of my pet hates. People assuming that because I am of a certain age then I must be a, “Youth Worker.”

It’s true I suppose, that the majority of ‘young people’ who are on staff in British churches are there as youth workers (my thoughts on this are a heated blog all of their own). But this isn’t my concern today. Actually the reason I even mention “Youth Workers” is to conjure up that role in a church, that idea that as churches we have tailored programmes and ministries for youth and children, as well as specialised workers to reach and teach them. Right so you’ve got that thought in your mind…so let me ask you a question:

“Where are all our ‘OAP Workers’?” 

The following link may alarm you. Government statistics from the 2001 census suggest that we live in an aging population!!! Not only do we live in a time where there are more over 60’s than under 16’s, but also a time where this ratio is still increasing in favour of the wrinklies.

It seems mind boggling to me that as churches we would set significant portions of our budgets to reaching people of about 2-18 years, while at the same time harbour a mindset that rights off an even larger segment of Britain. And lets be honest, that’s what we do, don’t get on any high horses, most of the time we wish we didn’t have to bother with them. We think to ourselves, “I hate ploughing resources into these meetings or ministries that only appeal to the oldies. Forget them, let’s focus on the future.”  Guess what…60+ IS THE FUTURE!!!

Now please, don’t come back to me saying that when we focus our attentions on reaching 60 pluses we aren’t going to have any impact on future generations. That’s just wrong. Our Sunday Schools would be a good deal fuller if we had more grandparents to bring their grand-kids to them! Also, just to throw a little more weight behind my argument, as churches we are always starving for more volunteer hours. Who else has more time on their hands than the retired population of Britain?

My point? We need to give this bracket of society the credit it deserves and figure out exactly how to tap this very, very deep well.

What are us evangelicals banging on about at the minute? That’s right, atonement. I’m going to resist the temptation to tag Chalke in this post, but it’s because of this fella that this post really exists.

As we’ve discussed, at quite some length at proGnosis, exactly what is wrong with ‘liberal’ Christians theology we’ve come up with some quite varied answers. Some of us think just screwy Cross theology, some think screwy Christology, others that it’s down to a misunderstanding of the nature of sin…or God. Me, I think it comes down to authority, and the authority of scripture at that.

So me and Grudem were snuggled up in bed the other night and I thought, “Hey, let’s check out the preface, see what drives a guy to right ‘Systematic Theology’.” Interestingly enough Grudem had this to say:

“I do not think that a true system of theology can be constructed from within what we call the ‘liberal’ theological tradition- that is people who deny the absolute truthfulness of the Bible… this does not mean that those in the liberal tradition have nothing valuable to say; it simply means that differences with them almost always boil down to differences over the the nature of the Bible and its authority.”

It’s like this, if two people come together to play rugby, one decides he’s playing by union rules, the other by league rules, they’ll never agree as to whether a try was scored or not because they aren’t starting from the same place. And it’s the same with people who slam Jesus and what He did for us. They cannot be coming from the same place with regards to the authority of scripture. The same is true for all manner of areas of theological concern. Unless we agree on the inspired, infallible, absolute authority of the Bible, we aren’t going to see eye to eye on much.

In fact, I think that authority issues play a bigger part in this, after all isn’t sin an authority issue? Instead of letting God be in control man wants to be in control himself. It’s idolatry. And so with the Bible, people don’t want to be ‘told how it is’ by a dusty old book, no they’d prefer to remain in the driving seat. So, their morals lead them or some arbitrary framework leads them, anything other than an outside authority.

When it’s the root of sin, no wonder it’s the root of slander against the cross.