Steve Jobs, the Silicon Valley, Jesus

Steve accomplished a staggering amount in 56 years. In my opinion, my life and your life is better because of a man named Steve. And now, Steve is dead. The man who improved our life has lost his life...

Read on...

Christianity Explored

One Life. What's it all about?

The -ations of the cross

From The Gospel Driven Church:

Mediation - There is a gulf between us and God, held in tension by his justified wrath owed to us for our sin. At the cross, the sinless Christ does the work of mediation both necessary and ordinarily impossible.

Condemnation - The mediator must accept the place of the guilty in order to exchange his innocence. Therefore he goes to the cross willingly, because it is the foreordained place of condemnation where we all belong. He becomes the substitute condemned and takes on the condemnation.

Propitiation - A blood debt is owed, legally speaking, because without the shedding of blood there can be no forgiveness of sins. But we cannot make this payment because we have no currency with which to do so. We are morally bankrupt, every last one of us. So at the cross, Christ makes this payment with the riches of himself, supplying his life to take the debt upon himself and thereby satisfying the law's demands. God's wrath is thereby appeased.

Imputation - By propitiating the debt of sin, he takes it off of the condemned onto himself as he becomes the condemned on the cross, but in doing that, he conveys his innocence to those actually guilty. He who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God. His righteousness is imputed to us; this means that we are counted righteous despite our sin.

Expiation - But Jesus doesn't stop there. With his life given sacrificially on the cross, he doesn't just take on our debt, he eradicates it completely. He takes it upon himself like the scapegoat to carry our sins into the void. Another way to say this is that Jesus' work on the cross doesn't just reckon us righteous, it actually makes us righteous.

Sanctification - An ongoing work of the Spirit, to be sure, but thanks to Christ's expiating work on the cross, we are also declared sanctified on the cross, which is to say, cleansed by his blood. (1 Corinthians 6:11)

Justification - Nearly all of Christ's crosswork put together merits what we receive through faith: right standing before God. Because of the cross, we for whom there was no justification are now justified.

Reconciliation - And since we are justified before God, we are reconciled to him. The gulf is bridged, the wrath appeased, the debt canceled and cast into the void, the soul cleansed. Christ's wide-open arms at the cross reveal to us the means of the Father embracing his once-lost children. Through the cross, Christ reconciles us to God. (Colossians 1:20)

Nations - Who is Christ's crosswork for, exactly? (1 John 2:2)

20 things God does in salvation

A helpful breakdown of 20 things that God does when He saves you, courtesy of Norm Millar, Senior Pastor at Harvest Bible Chapel London.

When God saves you, He…

1. Regenerates you, moving you from spiritual death to life. (John 3:1-8)
2. Redeems you, buying you out of slavery to sin. (1 Peter 1:18-19)
3. Justifies you, declaring you innocent in His sight. (Romans 5:1-9)
4. Sanctifies you, setting you apart as holy. (1 Cor 1:2,30)
5. Forgives you of all your sins. (Ephesians 1:7)
6. Cleanses you, removing from you the stain of sin. (Hebrews 9:14)
7. Reconciles you to Himself. (2 Corinthians 5:17-19)
8. Seals you with His Spirit as a guarantee of your future hope. (Ephesians 1:13)
9. Indwells you, sending the Holy Spirit to live in you. (Romans 8:9)
10. Adopts you, making you His child. (Romans 8:14-17)
11. Baptizes you into Christ’s body, the Church. (1 Corinthians 12:3)
12. Illuminates your mind so you can understand the Scriptures. (2 Corinthians 4:3-4)
13. Makes you a new creation. (2 Corinthians 5:17)
14. Reveals you as one of His elect. (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:29-30)
15. Grants you eternal life. (John 11:25-27, 1 John 5:11-13)
16. Names you an heir with Christ. (Romans 8:17)
17. Grants you an inheritance. (1 Peter 1:3-4)
18. Declares you a saint. (Romans 1:7, Colossians 1:2)
19. Grants you new citizenship, making your home heaven rather than this world. (Philippians 3:20)
20. Makes you a slave of Christ, a slave with the greatest, most glorious Master that any could ask for. (1 Corinthians 7:22-23)

(HT: Blogging Theologically)

The Nowism of the Gospel

...Jason's problem was that he was lost in the middle of his own faith. It had become harder and harder for him to connect the beauty of what he believed to the gritty and often difficulty realities of his daily life. Jason's problem was that he carried a gospel around with him that had a great big hole in the middle of it.

Jason could explain to you what it meant to say that he had been "saved by grace," and he knew that he was going to spend eternity with his Savior. His problem was in the here and now. Day after day, in situation after situation and relationship after relationship, Jason didn't carry with him a vibrant and practical sense of the nowism of the grace of Jesus Christ. Yes, Jason believed in life after death, but he desperately needed to understand life before death; the kind of radical life you will live when you understand what Christ has given you for the life he has called you to right here, right now....

Read the whole thing.

False gods and our Saviour

We have a great big God. But we do not always live as if this is true. We replace him with something else in our affections. Those are some of the reminders and challenges we were thrown this past Sunday. As we further reflect on Acts 17:16-34, here are some helpful thoughts from Tim Keller in his book Counterfeit Gods.

Keller defines an idol in this way:
"It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give...A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living."

From the Notes section in his book, he lays out a list of potential idols to which we might fall prey:

• Theological idols: Doctrinal errors that produce such distorted views of God that we end up worshipping a false god.
  
• Sexual idols: Addictions such as pornography and fetishisms that promise but don’t deliver a sense of intimacy and acceptance; ideals of physical beauty in yourself and/or a partner; romantic idealism.
  
• Magic/ritual idols: Witchcraft and the occult.
  
• Political/economic idols: Ideologies of the left, right, and libertarian that absolutize some aspect of political order and make it the solution, eg, deifying or demonizing free markets. [or in our context, elevating a particular political party to the position of national savior]
  
• Racial/national idols: Racism, militarism, nationalism, or ethnic pride that turns bitter or oppressive
  
• Relational idols: codependency, “fatal attractions,” living your life through your children.
  
• Religious idols: Moralism and legalism, idolatry of success and gifts, religion as a pretext for abuse of power.
  
• Philosophical idols: Systems of thought that make some created thing the problem with life (instead of sin) and some human product or enterprise the solution to our problems (instead of God’s grace).
  
• Cultural idols: Radical individualism (typical in the West, making an idol out of individual happiness at the expense of community); shame cultures that make an idol out of family and clan at the expense of individual rights.
  
• Deep idols: Motivational drives and temperaments made into absolutes
  - Power idolatry: “Life only has meaning/I only have worth if I have power and influence over others"
  - Approval idolatry: “Life only has meaning/I only have worth if I am loved and respected by _________"
  - Comfort idolatry: “Life only has meaning/I only have worth if I have this kind of pleasure experience or a particular quality of life"
  - Control idolatry: “Life only has meaning/I only have worth if I am able to get mastery over my life in the area of ___________"

Finally, Keller calls us back to the gospel of grace as the only remedy for our idolatry:

If we are deeply moved by the sight of his love for us, it detaches our hearts from other would-be saviors. We stop trying to redeem ourselves through our pursuits and relationships, because we are already redeemed. We stop trying to make others into saviors, because we have a Savior.

...If you only try to uproot [idols], they grow back; but they can be supplanted. By what? By God himself, of course. But by God we do not mean a general belief in His existence. Most people have that, yet their souls are riddled with idols. What we need is a living encounter with God.

...Jesus must become more beautiful to your imagination, more attractive to your heart, than your idol... We want to love Christ so much more that we are not enslaved by our attachments.

What can wash away our sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus!

Gospel intentionality and mission

"Being gospel-centered means we’re word-centered (because the gospel is a message; it is good news), and it means being mission-centered (because the gospel is a message to be proclaimed; it is good news)...

Most gospel ministry involves ordinary people doing ordinary things with gospel intentionality. It means doing the chores, having meals, watching sports, and so on with an intention to talk about Jesus, to pastor one another with the gospel, and to share that gospel with unbelievers. It's about a whole life lived in mission and community, in which we're always looking to build relationships and always looking to talk about Jesus. "
— Tim Chester

Doing ordinary things with gospel intentionality is to live, within the rhythms of everyday life, in such a way that opens up opportunities to communicate the truths of the gospel. Jonathan Dodson has 8 suggestions what doing ordinary things with gospel intentionality might look like. In light of the Great Commission (Matt 28:16-20), how might we, here in Malaysia, live with gospel intentionality? Feel free to throw in suggestions in the comments!

Secured by Christ on the cross!

Everything that we know and appreciate and praise God for in all Christian experience both in this life and in the life to come springs from this bloody cross.

Do we have the gift of the Spirit? Secured by Christ on the cross!

Do we enjoy the fellowship of saints? Secured by Christ on the cross!

Does he give us comfort in life and death? Secured by Christ on the cross!

Does he watch over us faithfully, providentially, graciously, and covenantally? Secured by Christ on the cross!

Do we have hope of a heaven to come? Secured by Christ on the cross!

Do we anticipate resurrection bodies on the last day? Secured by Christ on the cross!

Is there a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness? Secured by Christ on the cross!

Do we now enjoy new identities, so that we are no longer to see ourselves as nothing but failures, moral pariahs, disappointments to our parents—but deeply loved, blood-bought, human beings, redeemed by Christ, declared just by God himself, owing to the fact that God himself presented his Son Jesus as the propitiation for our sins? All this is secured by Christ on the cross and granted to those who have faith in him.

- D.A Carson, Scandalous