Ortlund The Gospel

How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-4086-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Reihe: Building Healthy Churches

How does the church portray the beauty of Christ? The gospel is the greatest message of all time addressing the greatest need of all people. However, the good news about Jesus does more than just promise eternal life to all who believe. In the latest addition to the 9Marks: Building Healthy Churches series, pastor Ray Ortlund explains the gospel's power to transform individuals from the inside out and create beautiful human relationships. This short book helps readers experience the power of God as they are encouraged to trust in Christ and allow him to transform their beliefs, perspectives, and practices. For everyone who wants to be true to the Bible and honest with themselves, this book offers a practical guide to the fundamental teachings of the gospel and how they affect our relationships with others.

Ray Ortlund is the president of Renewal Ministries, the pastor to pastors at Immanuel Church in Nashville, and a canon theologian with the Anglican Church in North America. He is the author of several books, including Marriage and the Mystery of the Gospel; The Death of Porn; and the Preaching the Word commentaries on Isaiah and Proverbs. He is also a contributor to the ESV Study Bible. Ray and his wife, Jani, have been married for fifty years.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ortlund, Ray

Leseproben

1

THE GOSPEL FOR YOU

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

John 3:16

Gospel doctrine creates a gospel culture. The doctrine of grace creates a culture of grace.

When the doctrine is clear and the culture is beautiful, that church will be powerful. But there are no shortcuts to getting there. Without the doctrine, the culture will be weak. Without the culture, the doctrine will seem pointless.

Gospel doctrine with gospel culture is prophetic. Francis Schaeffer wrote:

One cannot explain the explosive dynamite, the dunamis, of the early church apart from the fact that they practiced two things simultaneously: orthodoxy of doctrine and orthodoxy of community in the midst of the visible church, a community which the world could see. By the grace of God, therefore, the church must be known simultaneously for its purity of doctrine and the reality of its community. Our churches have so often been only preaching points with very little emphasis on community, but exhibition of the love of God in practice is beautiful and must be there.1

Schaeffer’s words “by the grace of God” are crucial. We need strength from beyond ourselves, because it’s hard to hold on to gospel doctrine. It’s even harder to create a gospel culture, one so humane and so attractive that people want to be part of it. Schaeffer also wrote: “If the church is what it should be, young people will be there. But they will not just ‘be there’—they will be there with the blowing of horns and the clashing of high-sounding cymbals, and they will come dancing with flowers in their hair.”2

We accept that the truth of biblical doctrine is essential to authentic Christianity, but do we accept that the beauty of human relationships is equally essential? If by God’s grace we hold the two together—gospel doctrine and gospel culture—people of all ages will more likely come to our churches with great joy. It is more likely that they will think, “Here is the answer I’ve been looking for all my life.”

DOCTRINE OR CULTURE?

Every one of us is wired to lean one way or the other—toward emphasizing doctrine or culture. Some of us naturally resonate with truth and standards and definitions. Others of us resonate with feel and vibe and relationships. Whole churches, too, can emphasize one or the other.

Left to ourselves, we will get it partly wrong, but we won’t feel wrong, because we’ll be partly right. But only partly. Truth without grace is harsh and ugly. Grace without truth is sentimental and cowardly. The living Christ is full of grace and truth (John 1:14). We cannot represent him, therefore, within the limits of our own personalities and backgrounds. Yet as we depend on him moment by moment, both personally and corporately, he will give us wisdom. He will stretch us and make our churches more like himself, so that we can glorify him more clearly than we ever have before.

These equations help me define the matter more simply:

Gospel doctrine – gospel culture = hypocrisy

Gospel culture – gospel doctrine = fragility

Gospel doctrine + gospel culture = power

Only the powerful presence of the risen Lord can make a church this gospel-centered.

Several years ago, author Anne Rice said, “Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love.”3 There might be many reasons for that negative assessment, not all of them convincing. But I cannot dismiss her comment. Neither does the problem that she highlights register as a low priority in the Bible, one we might get around to someday. In fact, few things are more urgent for us than to regain credibility as people who know how to love, for Jesus’s sake, so that his glorious gospel is unmistakably clear in our churches.

People will see him in us as we build our churches into gospel cultures with the resources of gospel doctrine, taking no shortcuts.

John 3:16, perhaps the most famous verse in all the Bible, spreads before us the doctrine of the gospel. This verse is the gospel for you and me personally. The renewal of our churches starts deep within each of us, as we are renewed in the gospel ourselves. So let’s think through this wonderful verse, phrase by phrase.

FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD

The gospel is good news, and these momentous words have to be the best news: “For God so loved the world . . .” (John 3:16a). Yet for this verse to make the impact on us it deserves, we must understand two things: who this God is and how he loves this world.

First, who is this God? The word God is so familiar to us that we might gloss over it. But we need to think about it. Not one of us has ever had a single thought about God that was fully fair to the magnitude of who he really is. Who is the God of the Christian gospel?

A contrast can help. In his book What Is the Gospel?, Greg Gilbert uses satire to help us see how we naturally diminish our concept of “God”:

Let me introduce you to god. (Note the lowercase g.)

You might want to lower your voice a little before we go in. He might be sleeping now. He’s old, you know, and doesn’t much understand or like this “newfangled” modern world. His golden days—the ones he talks about when you really get him going—were a long time ago, before most of us were even born. That was back when people cared what he thought about things, and considered him pretty important to their lives.

Of course all that’s changed now, though, and god—poor fellow—just never adjusted very well. Life’s moved on and passed him by. Now, he spends most of his time just hanging in the garden out back. I go there sometimes to see him, and there we tarry, walking and talking softly and tenderly among the roses. . . .

Anyway, a lot of people still like him, it seems—or at least he manages to keep his poll numbers pretty high. And you’d be surprised how many people even drop by to visit and ask for things every once in a while. But of course that’s alright with him. He’s here to help.

Thank goodness, all the crankiness you read about sometimes in his old books—you know, having the earth swallow people up, raining fire down on cities, that sort of thing—all that seems to have faded in his old age. Now he’s just a good-natured, low-maintenance friend who’s really easy to talk to—especially since he almost never talks back, and when he does, it’s usually to tell me through some slightly weird “sign” that what I want to do regardless is alright by him. That really is the best kind of friend, isn’t it?

You know the best thing about him, though? He doesn’t judge me. Ever, for anything. Oh sure, I know that deep down he wishes I’d be better—more loving, less selfish, and all that—but he’s realistic. He knows I’m human and nobody’s perfect. And I’m totally sure he’s fine with that. Besides, forgiving people is his job. It’s what he does. After all, he’s love, right? And I like to think of love as “never judging, only forgiving.” That’s the god I know. And I wouldn’t have him any other way. . . .

Okay, we can go in now. And don’t worry, we don’t have to stay long. Really. He’s grateful for any time he can get.4

Is there anything in Gilbert’s picture that reflects how we think of God? Let’s be honest with ourselves about this.

John Piper helps us all take our spiritual temperatures this way:

For many, Christianity has become the grinding out of general doctrinal laws from collections of biblical facts. But childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.5

In other words, we might affirm the right doctrines, but every one of us still needs to say: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!” (Ps. 139:23).

Let’s forget everything else for a moment. Let’s think about God, because “what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”6 God does not gain by our clarity about him. We do.

Go all the way back to the beginning. Where did you get your idea of God? And how do you know you didn’t make it up?

The gospel displays God gloriously, far beyond what we naturally think, even opposite to what we naturally think. For instance, early in the Bible, God says, “I am God Almighty” (Gen. 17:1). Almost no one believes that God is truly almighty, which is why God said it. But when that amazing thought about God drops into our mental pool, the ripples move out in all directions. Here is what God Almighty reveals to us about himself:

I am the Almighty God, able to fulfill your highest hopes and accomplish for you the brightest ideal that ever my words set before you. There is no need of paring down the promise until it squares with human probabilities, no need of relinquishing one hope it has begotten, no need of adopting some interpretation of it which may make it seem easier to fulfill, and no need of striving to fulfill it in any second-rate way. All possibility lies in this: I am the Almighty God.7

Without this real and glorious God, the task of our lives would be to keep adjusting our expectations of life downward. Author Reynolds Price understands how dark reality becomes without an almighty God: “There is no Creator and there never was. The...