A Theology Post.

This is a theology post. That means that it is supposed to be theological in nature, and have some level of smartypants theological content. But, then again, isn't everything we as Christians do supposed to be theological in nature? Isn't everything supposed to be centered in and around the study of God and how that plays out in our daily lives (which is what theology really is)?

Think about this: How do you think about theology? How to you think about God day in and day out? How do you think about how your family culture is shaped by your faith? How does our Christian faith in the finished work of Christ factor into how we do our jobs? Raise our kids? See those outside the faith?

We in the West are so compartmentalized in our thinking that we tend to literally only set aside Sundays for the worship of God. We have our work-life, our family-life, and our church-life. This is saying essentially: This way of me operating and living and my morals or actions are this way during this time and they are different at other times. And even as we protest that we may think back to how, subtlety, our thinking and actions may be different depending on the situation we find ourselves in.
If we find that we are being "more spiritual" on Sunday mornings (because we can't forget about that great American idol, Sunday night football) and Wednesday evenings than when we are sitting down with our co-workers during our lunch breaks on Tuesday...that's a problem.

Why?

Because in 1 Corinthians 10:31 we see that we are to do everything for the glory of God.

Now in context, the verse is involved in the conversation Paul is having with the Corinthian believers about offending the conscience and Christian liberty. In the larger context of chapter 10 it is nestled at the end of the chapter in which idolatry and meat offered to idols (and therefore eating meat and offending the conscience of someone) and so part of the take away from chapter 10 is the need for believers to look out for the weaker brother and to help strengthen him/her in the faith by helping to bear their conscience. This is essentially Christian living, which, if you read the New Testament, is never done in isolation. We have freedom in conscience, but it is for the service of our fellow believer. We don't eat meat offered to idols because it may burn the conscience of a weaker brother, causing him or her to stumble into sin. We see in this chapter and specifically this verse, that we are to live this way for God's glory. When we start to live this way, with God's glory as the reasoning for doing x, y, and z, we begin to lose the separate compartments that we have built into our lives. Everything we do begins to lose it's own inherent in your face urgency and fades into a daily day long pattern of seeking to bring glory to our Savior and King as we seek to strengthen our fellow believers.

Now how in the world are we supposed to do that? I mean, we have so much fighting against us don't we? The busyness and urgency with which we find our days seems to almost beg that it is impossible to break the cycle of compartmentalization and to see everything as something that can be holy is just hard to do. But there is freedom in fighting through that fight. There is freedom in finding out that doing the laundry in a way that is to bring glory to God (simply seeking to do it well to serve your family and therefore serve God) begins to make the chore itself seem less like a chore over time.

It turns into a joy to do the dishes (by hand!) or the laundry or balance the checkbook, or doing that report for your boss, whatever it is. There is holiness and grace to be found in seeing things as means to the end: glorifying God.

But now hold on, this can still be refined a wee bit more can't it? I mean, doing things for the glory of God? That could be a Jewish phrase, or even a Muslim command, so how does doing things for God's glory look explicitly Christian? Ah, that's a good question, don't you think? What makes our actions "Christian"? Have you ever thought about that? When we reflect on the questions that I posited at the beginning of this post, one thing keeps coming to mind: the finished work of Christ on the cross on our behalf.

Obviously, Christ is what makes us Christian and not Jewish or Muslim. Christ is what makes us believers in the true God and not the false god Allah or the misunderstood (and false) view of God that the Jews have. But it is not simply Christ that we find ourselves anchoring to, but it is the totality of who He is and what He has done. We rest not in the simple person of Jesus of Nazareth the carpenter, but Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who took on the flesh of man, lived the life of perfect obedience to God's Law and because of His Innocence and Perfection, took the place of sinful men on the cross so that through His death, and His glorious resurrection, we may get back everything that was lost in Adam. We rest on this work, on this Person. This means that when we are doing things for the glory of God we are not doing anything to satisfy anyone or anything and attempt to bring about our own salvation or justification, heck, even our own sanctification. We do things for the glory of God and subsequently the love of our neighbor because we have been saved and justified through the work of faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross. We aren't trying to earn anything (heaven forbid!) but everything we do, when done for the glory of God is us rejoicing in His mercy and goodness and trying to show that same to our neighbors.

So how do you think about theology? How do you make your life revolve around Christ and His cross? I don't think it will necessarily look the same for everyone, and that's ok. But we need to prayerfully seek God's glory and set time aside to seek His face and to try to pray through orienting our lives around Him. We need to take the time to fight the fight of de-compartmentalization of our lives and seek to see everything as a means to glorify our God and King through resting in who we are inside of Christ. This means that the best way to be a Christian architect is not to only design beautiful churches, but to do the job in an exemplary way that shows that you take pride in your gifts and talents that God gave you and that you use them to help others and love them in the same way that God loves you.This is being Salt and Light. This is being a Christian. We also need to remember that we if we are Christian architects that we are Christians first that happen to have a job as an architect. The best way for you to be a Christian mother or father or ad executive or whatever it is, is by doing everything out of a love for God and neighbor (whoever that may be) and seeking to bring honor and glory to the God that redeemed us and to seek to do so as consistently as possible throughout our whole lives. We need to seek to love and to show God's love to everyone we meet, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to seek to lift up and strengthen the family of God that we meet day in and day out through love.

All for the glory of God.

Undas and the Reformation in the Philippines

As most everybody knows, this week celebrated the 500th anniversary of when Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenburg, Germany. The Protestant Reformation was kicked off from this otherwise normal event, as Luther and the Roman Catholic magesterium (popes, cardinals, bishops, so on) dug their heels in over the argument over the gospel and the final authority in the church. To Luther and the other Reformers, the Gospel was buried underneath all the junk of Roman Catholic tradition that had accrued over the years, with the teachings on indulgences and purgatory and the selling of "grace" by the popes being some of the most obscene displays of any sort of religious leadership, and it is the mess with indulgences that actually prompted the 95 Theses. Pressing into the conversation about church practices led to conversations about authority within the church itself. Luther began making arguments from Scripture and reasoned that practices or teachings that were not in the Bible need to be gotten rid of as they pollute and mess up the worship of God and how Christians practice their faith. The Catholics were swinging hard for the opposite: the gospel was not based on grace and faith alone but on the dependence of the person on the grace to be dispensed by the Catholic church itself. This also made sure to vest final authority not in the Bible, but in the Pope as the one who was in possession of the keys of the treasury of heaven, able to dispense grace as he saw fit. 

It's odd that from our vantage point here in the Philippines I see (at least on the Internet) calls and questions about what the Reformation was about and if it is still a thing that is needed today. The questions and posts go like this: Catholics and Protestants believe basically the same things right? I mean, they both say they love Jesus and believe that it is by grace through faith in Christ and His work on the cross that we are saved, so it's all good! Besides, aren't there other things that we need to worry about right now like all the racial issues and abortion and radical Islam and radical atheism and the moral decline of the country and North Korea and that America is looking less like a Christian nation and looking more like....well, who knows! Aren't all these things more important than squabbles over doctrine and practice? Isn't the overwhelming situation in the world excuse enough to excuse Protestants and Catholics from arguing over something that happened 500 years ago so that they can band together and fight the culture war together? 

There have been others, much smarter than me, who have dealt with this question. I'm not worried about all that now. Not really. 

I think about the question of if the Reformation still matters as I ride in a tricycle that has prayer beads hanging right in my face. I think about the Reformation when I walk into a store and they have a small shelf with candles and a figure of Santo Niño so that they can gain his blessing in their work. I think about the fact that while Halloween has come and gone people here (Catholics and other Christians) are celebrating the festival of Undas. 

This week school is out. People are off work, and it is the time of Undas here in the Philippines. The whole country has the week off because of this three day holiday. It may not be as flashy as Dia de los Muertos in Mexico, but Halloween, All Saints and All Souls Day(s) are a time when families go out to cemeteries and remember the dead. That in and of itself is not that bad or problematic, not at all. But they will take food and drink out to their departed family members and have a meal with them. They will say prayers for the dead, they will spend the two days at the grave site communing with their dead. Sometimes they do try to get an indulgence (still on the books in the Catholic church!) for their departed or say a Mass for the dead. But the streets are almost empty, as hundreds and hundreds of people go back to their family hometown so they can visit the resting places and offer sacrifices to the dead so they can intercede for the living. 

So I don't really wonder about whether the Reformation is over or not, or whether or not the differences between Catholics and Protestants matter or not. Of course they do! My family and I currently live in the "most Christian country in Asia" that is a modern pre-Reformation Europe, in some small very rural areas the Bible is still located only in the church and the priest (when he is there) is the only one able to read and interpret the Bible for the people in the pews. The situation here is one in which what looks like work among an already "Christian" peoples is really work with pagans that pray for and to the dead, offer them food and drink, worship statues of people rather than the God who created them and think that by doing all of that plus other good works gets them into heaven. So we are working here among people who are believing a false Gospel (which Paul says is no Gospel at all!) and trying to get the few churches that are here and evangelical to get outside their own doors and preach the Gospel and hold out the true hope that they have found in Christ and His blood shed on the Cross! 

So while some of us did celebrate the 500th of the beginning of the Reformation, we don't have to ask if it is over, we know it's not. We have the Word of God in English (and Cebuano), and we don't say the Mass every Sunday, and we get both the Cup and the Bread in the Lord's Supper, and we don't pray to the dead begging them to pray for us, and we (most importantly) have all of this because the Gospel has freed us from the legalistic bondage that worldly religion tries to tie us to, we have experienced the freedom that the Gospel brings us and we see the world through this lens. 

Pray that the people here in the Philippines would also learn to see this way. Pray that they too would get all that we have, not because we are better or brighter than they are, but because we have heard and we have tasted and seen that our God and His Gospel is good. 

Atong Trabaho (Our Work)

Let's talk about work, everybody loves work right, ooh, and geography, everybody is a fan of that too, right?

This is a picture of Tubajon, the municipality that we are working in on Dinagat Island, which is north of Surigao Del Norte (at the bottom of the map), which is on the current island that we live on, Mindanao (that was a mouthful).

The area is divided into 9 baranagays. These 9 barangays are spread out through the whole of the red area on the map, with most of them actually being along the coast inside the sideways v looking bay on the left side of the island. For our purposes, we are basically calling them villages that all answer to one mayor, even though each of them have a barangay captain that is responsible to the mayor for the administration of that area.

Out of the nine that are in this area, there are four barangays (that we know of) that have absolutely no evangelical church anywhere within their administrative areas. These four areas are going to be our objective for church planting. With the contacts that we have within one of the barangays we will seek to do some training for some local church planters who will be able to get into these areas much easier than we ever could and work on planting a church through door to door evangelism and Bible Studies. We will help with teaching and leading as we need to and as we are able, but we will hope that these men will be planted there to start and lead a healthy gospel centered church.

I, Jeff, personally have big dreams about this work and this area. I hope that we can get in there and help see some revitalization of one of our partner churches and that the pastor, along with our main national parter Rudy (go send him a friend request on facebook and let him know your praying for him!) and I can start a sort of training center for pastors that can be a big help to other pastors in the area as far as theological and leadership development go. I want to have conferences that are encouraging and challenging and helpful to the leaders. I want to see solid, evangelical, gospel centered, Word and sacrament (or ordinance) churches that preach the Gospel and rightly administer the Lord's Supper and baptism.

When we go to Tubajon we are both encouraged and discouraged at the same time. We are encouraged that there are people there who want to serve the Lord and seek to do so as much as they are taught to by their churches and leaders. We are encouraged by them being so welcoming and loving towards us, which is amazing because rural areas here tend to feel like they are more suspicious of us than anything else. But we are also discouraged because people are still lost there. Hopelessly lost and trapped in sin and enslaved to dead ritualism that they are told will save them. There are people there who are not being taught the Gospel of our God but false and twisted doctrines that don't do anything for their spiritual state. We are discouraged because of the evangelical churches that are there, they are weak and discipleship and fellowship and the Bible is not really a priority that is being taught all the time and lived out by the leaders within their community. Our hearts break for these people not because we have the answers and can fix them, but because we have had the answer preached to us and we have had the truth told to us and shown to us. The answer will not come from us, but we will still tell them about Him. So pray with us, pray for Dinagat. Pray for Tubajon and the government there, and the people there and the churches that are there. Pray for the churches that are not yet. Pray for the Christians that are not yet. Pray for us, that we would teach not what we see fit, but what God sees best through His Word.

The Need

Recently in church we heard a really convicting sermon about the need for missions and how only through  resting in Christ are we able actually to do the task that He has given us. There was this video that we watched at the end of the sermon, listing facts and statistics about world missions and other related issues. That video is posted below.

This sermon and especially the video has got me thinking. There is so much work for the church to do in the world. And even though we live here, even though we work here, we can and will never able to do enough. That is the reality of the situation. We will never be able to "save" enough people before we are done with our work here.  But none of us are called to do any more than what we have been given. We (and that includes you too, Reader), as servants, are only told to share the Gospel as we go throughout the world. We are not able to save the world, but our God is able and willing to do that through us. This means that we don't have to feel that weight of responsibility for people's souls. We can't do anything to save any other person. We can't even save ourselves! But we need to be faithful and let God do the work that only He can through us.

After the service I decided to look up some more statistics on missions because of the video and I was shocked to see some of these numbers. It's a really long page, so I'll just link it here. It's a really good resource because it compiles a lot of different sources for this rather interesting list that breaks down not only where money tends to go, but where missionaries tend to go, and where they are actually needed (in terms of lost unreached people groups).

Most of the money that we as North American Christians put towards international missions is just spinning wheels "out there", not being put to use to evangelize the lost but sometimes to other Christian denominations (!) or training of local churches. I don't really have anything to say about where or how money is spent by organizations. But to this last point (training local churches) I do want to say something. The work we are doing and will soon be doing out in the villages of Dinagat are among the unreached. These people are trapped in darkness of cults and false religions that bind their people to false beliefs. These people are trapped in a system of works-salvation, thinking that they can do something to earn their way to heaven.  But the more gospel-centered churches that actually are here are the ones that need to be doing the bulk of the work, not us. I think that one reason that money is going more towards training and facilitating is that once there is a national, local gospel-centered church on the ground in any country, that church then bears the responsibility to plant other churches. Part of problem that we have seen in Tubajon is that they don't really know how to go about taking the gospel out to people who need it.  So we will go in hard and heavy first and help the few churches that are there and actually want our help with continuing the training of the pastors and helping them with evangelism and discipleship because without these things they will not be able to go and do the work God has given them. Without helping some weak churches see the value and utmost importance of God's Word and how the Spirit uses the Word through preaching and discipleship, they are likely to slip more into the muck of syncretism and accepting false beliefs as part of the gospel. These healthy churches can then be used by God to expand His kingdom in Dinagat as they are seeking to lift Him up and have Him glorified through the preaching of the Word, the proper administration of the ordinances and the sharing of the Gospel.

While we will be doing the training with them we hope that we will be able to be part of planting a church (by God's grace) in an area that we know has people who are interested in Truth and the Gospel. So we will be working with churches, this is true, and ultimately we think, right. But we will be working with them so that they are fully equipped and ready and able to share the gospel and plant churches that are vibrant and growing and that are able to replicate themselves, not American-style churches.

But this issue of evangelism and discipleship even touches our churches in the States, doesn't it? We are not equipping Believers in America to do the work that needs to be done, or at least not enough. Emphasis is not placed on evangelism, it's not placed on teaching people how to be strategic and purposeful in where we live and how we spend our money. According to the stats that I linked to, most non-Christians do not even know a Christian. The reverse of that fact, that most Christians don't know non-Christians, is shameful. We are living in our Christian bubbles effectively cut-off from the people that actually need the thing we have - the Gospel! What makes this fact worse is that we currently live in an age of hyper-connectivity and our world feels smaller than it did fifty years ago (from what I've been told by people old enough to say that).

Paul tells us in Romans 10 that non-believers won't come to salvation outside of the Gospel being preached to them. That means that people have to preach the gospel. Which means people have to be sent, by being taught and trained how to do just that. But I think that the reason we aren't doing the preaching of the Gospel part of the Great Commission and Romans 10 goes beyond lack of training by churches. I think consistent, solid evangelism-discipleship is absent from church culture today because our theology about this whole thing is flawed. More specifically, our theology may not be affecting our heart. It's all up in the head, and the brokenness, the misery, the suffering, we simply don't care. We need to realize that people that we know (and that we don't yet know) are living and dying without access to the very same thing that you desperately need every single day. God's grace. God's mercy. God's salvation. We don't know how to move the knowledge that there are people destined for hell for all eternity from our head down to our hearts. If we did, then we wouldn't have such a sorry state of evangelism-discipleship and church planting in the world. So we need to see the people that are around us as people who cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps in true American fashion, grit their teeth and be saved. They are dead. They can't do that. Even if they could put in the effort, they wouldn't reach it, God's righteousness is too high above us for us to reach. And since we are unable to save ourselves, someone had to preach the Gospel to us and the Holy Spirit had to move within us, making us alive to salvation.

It's almost a cliche now, but you don't have to be a missionary to reach the world, especially in America. No matter your political view on refugees and immigrants, you can't deny that most of them are lost and need a Savior. Forget refugees and immigrants, we can't even deny that we are living in a post-Christian culture in which millions of people are leaving nominal Christianity to embrace the spirit of the age. You can't deny that they need Jesus. The only thing you can deny is them the opportunity to hear about salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. You can deny that. And most of us do, to our eternal shame.

So attend that evangelism training that your church offers. If your church doesn't do anything, for whatever reason, ask your pastor for some recommendations on evangelism. Learn what biblical evangelism is and what it isn't. Pray, get courage and strength from God and go share the Good News with someone. We may not be responsible for saving people, but we are responsible to tell them Who can.

A Few Thoughts

What happened over the last weekend in Charlottesville is horrible. A person lost their life. Sin reared its ugly head. Hundreds of lost people had their hearts hardened even more by the sins of others and their own sinfulness. Let's make no mistake about it, we are talking about sin. Is bigotry bad? Yes. But is it worse than lying? Or adultery? Or stealing, or idolatry? Before you get upset that I just equated racism with lying, consider this:

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. (James 2:10-13)

We need to realize that there is no innocent party here. All of us have sinned, all of us have had hard, hate-filled thoughts about the people that we disagree with over the alt-right, the BLM and anyone and everyone in between. John tells us that if we say we hate our brother we cannot have the love of God within us. This, for Christians, is serious business. I have seen good Christians on social media say, with pride, that they would punch neo-nazis, or yell and try to drown-out those that they are against. What is this? Why are we acting like this? Do we not know that since we have our citizenship in heaven we need to be actually acting like we don't belong here? Yes, of course we are supposed to be trying to affect change in the world! But why are we trying to do that by using the same idiotic and sinful means that those outside the church are using? Shouldn't we be against all of that- the hate-filled rhetoric, the verbal abuse, the aggressive body language and physical violence against others? Shouldn’t we be against it entirely, including using it? As believers we don't try to fight fire with fire. We fight everything with the Gospel of Christ and the blood that He shed on the cross to deal with this mess. Am I saying there is not racism and bigotry in the church? No, because there definitely is racism in the church, and it definitely needs to be dealt with. Christ’s sheep have been hurt by racism. What I am saying is that if we are called by Christ's name, we are doing pretty crappy jobs of representing Him to a people who don’t yet have relationship with Him. We need to understand that those brothers and sisters that are black or hispanic have indeed faced different trails and problems, different hurts and pains. They have experienced injustice and racism, and we have to face that at some points in church history, the church itself has been the force behind that pain.

I have also read weak whimpers of Christian leaders whose words betray that they care more about national unity and the "bullying" of the president than they care about the Church and how it has the words and the means to actually heal. Are they our words? No, they are the Words of Christ, but we, as His Church, can wield them as a balm to heal and restore, or a sword with which to cut down. In Jeremiah, God denounces the leaders of Israel (the kings, priests, and prophets) for calling out "peace peace" when everything around them was burning. As leaders in churches, we have the responsibility to call out sin in the world, to be that prophetic voice. But if we fail to point out that the Gospel is the ONLY way that anything can actually change, then we have failed as ministers. If we suggest that protesting and yelling and being angry (whether "righteously" or not) is the "only way" things will get better in America then we have failed. If we forget that, as sinners, we ourselves cannot eradicate sin from our lives, much less a society, and forget to point to the Gospel as the means to defeat sin, then we have failed.  As believers we cannot be surprised that sinners sin. Let me repeat that. As believers we cannot be surprised that sinners sin. What else can we expect of them? Why are we holding unbelievers to the same standard that we need to hold each other to? When did we become God, the one who Judges?

Yes, we need to see that racism is a sin. It demeans the image of God that is in every single person. It inherently says that you are against God, how He made humanity, and His purposes in creation. A black man, Richard Spencer, and a poor Filipino fisherman all have the same inherent value as a being created in the image of God. This. Is. A. Fact. And this fact must lead us to believe that they have worth. They deserve to be treated as humans. Not anything else. This means that anybody who is a human 1) is a sinful creature whose rebellious actions against God are justly punished and 2) is yet loved as a creature that God lovingly formed in the womb.

Racism is sinful and it is a sin committed against "outsiders" because those outside of a particular group are not like those inside of that particular group. They are "different".

But outsiders of what exactly? What are the people who are against immigrants and people of different races actually for in these instances? Are they for a race, a flag, a president, themselves? It seems to me that if we as Christians put our hope in this country and what happens here, then we have put our faith in the flag and not the cross. If we are putting our faith in any politician as someone who can fix our country's problems then we have our faith in the flag and not the cross. If we are too stuck on fixing America without preaching the Gospel and reaching out to heal and to help, then we have put our faith in the flag and not the cross.  If you happen to be one of the thirty or so people who read this and are one of those people who seem to care more for your political idolatry than taking the gospel to the unreached, taking care of the poor and needy, or standing up for the oppressed then I will stop right here and tell you to repent from your idolatrous ideology and nationalism. Turn to put your faith in Christ and not the United States. Christ and His church will outlast any and all governments. This glorious fact makes lines that we draw on a map differentiating where "our land" is from "their land" so that "we" can keep "them" out seem very silly. That is a small thing in light of history and eternity. If you put your hope in those lines or that flag, that is a sinful thing. If you put your faith in the color of your skin, thereby dehumanizing another because they have more melanin than you? That's wicked.

Ok, let's all take a breath....

Something else we all need to remember is that sin, of any type, will never truly go away with the passing of time until the coming of Christ. While reading article after article about all of this white supremacy nonsense a line jumped out at me. It said that people thought that feelings like this (racism) had been buried long ago (and were, therefore, somehow forgotten), and the people of America were surprised by this seeming reemerging of this particular sin. Once we recognize any sin as sin, then we have to wrestle with the reality that we cannot put sin to death by our own strength. Yet as Americans we tend to feel that everything is within our reach and everything is doable with enough time, patience and grit. Just enough elbow grease and we can tackle any problem thrown our way. Except our sin. Except our spiritual deadness. Except our condemnation as rebels under the wrath of God.

Oops.

Sin will not go away. It will always be there. We can't defeat racism. Anyone that tells you that we can is a liar. Anyone that tells you we can defeat X sin and eradicate it from the face of the earth is selling you snake oil. Don't listen to them! We, as finite sinful creatures, cannot run from our sin, especially if we are trapped in the shackles of it. We need to stop with the idea that we can kill racism, or poverty, or lying, or cheating, or stealing, etc. We can't. We don't have the strength to do any of that.

But there is One who can. If we run to the cross we can find the death of sin. If we run to the cross we will find the end of evil and despair. If we run to the cross, repent and believe in Christ, that He is the one who took our sin and died when we should have been the ones suffering in agony for the weight of sin and misery that we have caused with our hands....then we can be free. While we still live in the flesh we will still wrestle with sin, this is true. But sin is defeated for those in Christ. We are no longer held in bondage to our sin. And we have hope that one day (hopefully soon!) sin and death will be defeated for good and Christ will put an end to all of our suffering on this earth with its renewal.

So where do we go from there as Christians? If racism is wicked and if its not going away, what are we supposed to do? I think walking through a few passages of Scripture will help us to maybe see what some practical next steps for "regular" Christians might be.

We start in Genesis. In chapters 1-3 we see marvelous things happening. The creation of the world. The separation and organization of the universe under the care and management of the Creator. We also see horror happen as our parents fall into sin and bring misery upon the creation, distorting and twisting and marring what God called good a few chapters before. But we see a promise. We see God extend His grace with the protoevangelium, the first preaching of the gospel by God Himself to Adam and Eve. He tells the woman that the serpent will bruise the heel of her Son and He will crush the head of the snake, in this we look forward to Christ's work on the cross.

After the people get things really messed up and God tries to start clean with Noah and his family we have the Tower of Babel. This is where we sinned against God in our arrogance trying to raise ourselves up to His level. He responds by confusing our language. Already right here we can see the inevitable. We can see here the beginnings of an “us” against “them” mentality as humanity splits up among languages and form bonds and communities and eventually nations and kingdoms by this division of languages. We are able to see that we are fractured and separated and divided and it is because of sin that we are like that.

But after the ascension of Christ we have a reversal of that event. Pentecost is the undoing of the curse of Babel. God gifts the apostles with the ability to speak and preach in the languages of other nations so that the Gospel can be preached and the reuniting of humanity back together under God along with all of creation can begin to take place in earnest.

The launch of the church is the reconciliation of humanity to God but also of humanity to itself. We see this in Ephesians 2:13-16. God is bringing people who are far away together in Christ by the cross. He is our peace, we have nothing else separating us because Christ has broken down the walls of hostility that divided us. That is more than just the law, because Paul talks about there being no national distinctions among Christians because all are one in Christ. So if we are white, or brown, or black, if we are American, Filipino, Korean, if we are in Christ not one of those markers define us. In Christ we are not Americans, because that is not the identity we have in Christ. In Christ we are not black or white, because that is not a part of the identity that we have in Christ. The idea of ethnic or cultural Christianity and it being a European cultural marker is a bald faced lie. Christianity, true Christian faith, does not recognize the boundaries of made up countries. Are there actual differences between believers? Of course! Most Sundays it is mentally taxing to try to overcome the language barrier that we face at the church we attend here in the Philippines, but does that actually separate us from one another? No way! I am more closely related to those brothers and sisters whom I can barely speak with than any of my biological family that is not Christian. So we must see that we are united in Christ, we are one only in Him, because He has not only taken our sin, He has taken the things that kept us apart in hostility and killed all of it on the cross.

So what exactly am I trying to say here? We need to face reality. Sin and racism are not going away, and they never have. It is an ugly truth, but sin is ugly. But we can have hope if instead of trying to navel-gazing we take an eternal look at this situation. We can see that the issues that divide our country right now, real issues that affect real people, is sin that will be dealt with by Christ at His coming. And until then we must do two things. First, we must preach the gospel faithfully, because this gospel helps us to see that our sin is real, and it is deep and ugly and the only thing that can deal with it is Christ. It also helps us to see that all that sin does in separating us is undone in Christ because of the cross. So we preach the gospel because it really and truly is the only hope that anybody has, whether they are American or not. And second, we must strive daily to be a better representative of who Christ is. That Gospel that we are to be preaching commands us to love like Christ loves, bear each others burdens, take care of the poor and the oppressed, be salt and light.

The Importance of Theology in the Christian Life

Now, I love theology. I love the popular theology books as well as the more academic theological books. I love to try to see how the theologian tries to make his case for his particular view, use (or misuse) Scripture and other authors as argument or counter-argument. I enjoy (in the most Christian and holy sense) to see someone take another person to the floor (figuratively speaking) for their bad use of Scripture or church history or logic.

It's not just the reading of big books by people with phd behind their name or the big ideas being thrown around and discussed. It's the community experience of theology. Theology should be a community experience, where people pray through and discuss the big thoughts of our glorious God as revealed in the Bible. That is where iron sharpens iron and we grow in our knowledge of God, are corrected for faulty or dangerous beliefs and generally grow in fondness and adoration of God, the ultimate subject of theology.

But sadly, most people don't feel this way. Now are our home church I was blessed to be involved with multiple people who loved reading and discussing theology almost every time we saw each other. Most lay people nowadays are afraid to read theology, or they don't know where to begin, or, even worse, they think that its not important to living a fulfilling Christian life.

Why is that? Why would people shy away from studying the big things of God? One reason is that they see theology as a purely academic exercise, reserved for seminary professors or really smart pastors. Others think that they are not theologians because they were taught that learning (when it comes to the Bible) what other people think about the Bible is dangerous and that if you learn about the various atonement theories or whatever you are squelching the Spirit from being able to lead you. Others actually see doctrine as being divisive, and they see how people can get worked up over whether one holds to a amil, post-mil, or pre-mil view of the end-times and they don't want to be apart of that and either be hurt or hurt someone else over something as "silly" as theology.

All of these excuses are really bad. They ultimately show that the people who hold them don't understand the importance of theology in the life of the Christian, even the average, run of the mill believer who has never taught a Sunday-School class or even been asked to lead prayer at the annual men's breakfast. They don't understand that what you believe actually matters, that they influence your views of God, His work in the world, in salvation, in history and in your life. They don't understand that theology, when done right, leads to praise and adoration of God. They don't see that through reading and discussing various doctrines of the church they are actually growing in godliness and intimacy not only with God but also with the people they are discussing these glorious topics. They have a stagnant Christian life and they think that everything is hunky-dory simply because they go to church on Sundays and have no interaction with the Bible on deeper levels of thinking, really dwelling on the Word and thinking about the implications of how a particular passage plays out in the real world, because that is what theology is!

So let's take a quick look at some of the excuses that I gave and try to talk through them a bit, this is in no way comprehensive, there is so much more that can be said in each of these points. Ok, here we go!

1. Theology as Academic
One of the main problems that the church faces is that most of the local congregations are theologically weak and anemic. Sure the pastor and teachers may be up on what's going on in the theological world, but quite a few people see it as a specialized field of academia. I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying there is a problem with that. Theology is first and foremost for the church as a whole. It should not be just for those ivory tower guys, but theology is also for people living in the trenches of everyday life. Studying various doctrines of God and His immutability could help remind a person whose life is spinning out of control that God never changes, and therefore will keep His promises. Or someone who has prayerfully studied through the doctrine of assurance can rest a bit easier when he is having a dark night of the soul.

2. Learning about the Bible is dangerous
This, for some reason, is the excuse that you hear from mostly rural churches that are in the Deep South. Or Arkansas. The people who think that all that education at a Bible college will mess you up and turn you into an atheist and a democrat, so don't mess with books, even about the Bible. This is so crazy, considering the multiple places in the Bible itself that we are told to guard the deposit of faith, to make sure that we are qualified to teach and preach the gospel correctly, to be able to rightly divide the Word. To be able to understand and properly interpret the Bible is very important, not just for pastors, but for the average layman. As Baptists, we believe in the priesthood of believers and therefore we all have the right and responsibility to read the Bible and should be able to interpret the Bible. The fear of education corrupting good men called to the ministry comes from the modernist/fundamental crises from over a century ago, where seminaries actually did corrupt and destroy the faith of good men because of bad theology. But now there are good books by good men who love the Bible and all that it contains, who want for the men who preach in the pulpit to be able to read, interpret and defend his own sermon and approach to interpreting the Bible, and therefore their faith. I would be hard pressed to find any pastor worth his salt who said that he would rather not have a theologically (and therefore biblically) literate congregation who had the ability to call his error when it occurs.

3. Doctrine divides
There is a saying, that theology divides, it divides the sheep from the goats. That may sound harsh, but I think that it's true. The fact of the matter is this: everyone is a theologian, everyone believes something. Whether they take what they get from the pulpit as gold and never question their pastor, or get their theology from the plethora of garbage from televangelists who promise God's blessing for a little seed of faith, more money with which to buy their next jet. Or they might get it from the pop section of their local bookstore, where soft heresy is floated as being ok and for the most part, directed at unsuspecting Christian women it seems.
There is good doctrine. There is bad doctrine. The good doctrine agrees with Scripture, the bad does not. The good doctrine will be edifying to the church as a whole and will deepen the relationship of the believer with God and his fellow brothers and sisters. Bad doctrine will cause a person to have a crisis of faith when God is not blessing them the way they feel like they deserve, or they will allow sin to be tolerated because they want to be seen as "loving" because they hold to bad doctrine that does not reflect the truth of the Bible.
So yes, doctrine divides, but if we say that we don't want to read and study the glory of God through various doctrines or theology then we are ultimately of the opinion that theology and doctrine is itself, merely opinion and not an attempt to define and explore truth. We will run the risk of having bad theology ourselves, maybe even tricking ourselves into a false sense of security with regards to our salvation. The truth is that theology and doctrine, what we believe and how we articulate it, has eternal weight attached to it. Not all doctrine is of the same level as gospel-level importance. Christian unity is centered on doctrines regarding Christ first, and doctrines that naturally flow out of that (justification, sin, good works, etc.) come to play very important roles within the church. We need to try to make sure that as much as we can, we hold the same theology as the Bible, and good theology starts with the Bible itself. These doctrines are worth dividing over, worth disrupting congregations and denominations over truth. These types of doctrines are precisely why the Protestant Reformation even happened in the first place. Other doctrine, like how the end of the world plays out, whether you are amil or pre-mil, that is not a gospel issue and should not hinder two people from having unity in Christ. Some doctrines are more important than others, some are worth causing division over, some are not, wisdom is learning which is which.

For Christians who have no interest or have a fear of studying theology, I hope they understand there is nothing to be afraid of, as long as we are faithful to God and His Word. Theology and doctrine naturally flow out of a desire to know and understand God better, to take what His Word says, to see how He has revealed Himself to us, and try to articulate that truth.
The next step for us is seeing that theology cannot be done by ourselves in a vacuum. It needs to be first and foremost accompanied by a robust walk with God. One where the Bible is treasured and devoured daily as sustenance to carry us through our various trials and tribulations of our days. If/when we decided to take up theology, then we need to be humble and do so in community, ask your pastor, ask your small group or Sunday-School leader. Read through something with a friend and meet for coffee and discuss it. Pray over your theology, but do not worship it. Pray that it is honoring to God and bringing Him glory.
Once we have begun to study and to revel in the knowledge of our God and King, then we can take the natural next step and worship Him because of what we read and how we grow in grace and understanding.
As the old saying goes, theology leads to doxology.

Holiness is messy

The process that God uses to bring us, His children, though sanctification is often a very messy one. Oftentimes it involves us being in difficult or painful situations that we may not even recognize as "sanctifying" but nonetheless are. God will use earthly, messy, dirty means by which to give us His grace and draw us into a closer relationship with Him, making us reflect His Son that much more. He gives us earthly reminders (Lord's Supper, baptism) as ways that we use along our path in which He continues to remind us that He makes us clean and holy.
The sacrificial system that God gave the Israelites were full of these types of references, these markers and reminders. Of course they were all shadows of the future Christ and His sacrifice that was the fulfillment of those laws (Heb. 8:13, 9:11-14). The Red Heifer, mentioned in Numbers 19 (and alluded to in Heb. 9:13), is a great example of one of those ways. The red heifer was burned and its ashes were used in a purification ceremony in which the ashes were mixed with water and sprinkled on anything that is unclean in order to purify it, to make it clean and undefiled before God.
Now, we know that this law was a sign, a symbol of Christ to come and to purify us and make us clean before God. The author of Hebrews knows this and recognizes that while the ashes of the heifer do indeed cleanse the flesh, Christ and the fulfilment of that law obtained eternal redemption (Heb. 9:13,14).
But look at both of these purifying means, both given by God. They are messy. The sacrificial system used blood, the hacking apart of animals, blood, ashes, and water. These elements were used for purification and a way to come into God's presence in His temple. Christ's sacrifice was no less messy, being one of the most horrendous death that ever took place in history. Blood was spilled, flesh torn, the earth quaked, the sun darkened. God's creation was affected by this Death. Our sanctification was wrought in blood, sweat and tears. By these means our eternal redemption was obtained. The daily process of sanctifying is (blessedly) less bloody, but it is difficult and God uses the creation around us to show us grace and draw us to Him.
As many of you know, we have had kids come every day to play with the girls. They are so social they feed off of kid interaction. Our neighbors are slightly older and have told us they think the kids are trying to take advantage of us, and they are shaming Filipinos by their actions. Since they are just kids we just tried to brush it off and tell them they were fine, acting as kids do (noisy, somewhat mildly destructive, etc.) but then about two weeks ago the husband came home for his lunch and straight up yelled at the kids, chasing them off. I went to talk to him about yelling at my guests and an argument ensued. Yelling took place, frustration was released, and Christ was not glorified. When Ate Mimi arrived at our house for class we told her all that had happened. She explained why he yelled at the kids, that Filipinos (at least this guy) sometimes keep their emotions in check too long and they kind of burst out like that. She also told us the obvious: that because we are Kristohanon (Christian) we need to seek reconciliation and if possible, a sharing of the gospel.
That's the rub, the hard uncomfortable part. Swallowing my pride, realizing where I was wrong and in humility asking for forgiveness, and even help in getting to understand Filipino culture better. The messy relationships that we have are, if used and viewed properly, a means of grace to us, an earthly means used by our Father's hands to mold and shape us into the image of His Son. He scrapes away the useless muck and gunk that we amass to reveal humility and holiness. It's not always pretty, its almost always messy, but it is sanctifying.
After waiting about one week, I tried to initiate conversation, to apologize. But I was actually ignored, making me frustrated all over again. About another week went by and I was able to try to apologize but all I got was more complaining and a little bit of a raised voice about how bad those kids are. He still really won't talk to me, and the kids haven't really been back like they used to, only two girls have come by twice to play with Sophia and Aaryn since that day.
So pray for him, I don't even know his name, but pray that God would soften his heart so that we could maybe share the gospel with him. Pray for us, that we would be intentional in how we form all of our relationships here, that we would be a good reflection of what God has done in our lives and a good witness to our King.

On the Kingdom and Culture

Over the past few years we have seen the growing tide away from Christian values, especially with the legalization of gay marriage and this new push for transgender recognition.
With the coming of the collapse of cultural Christianity I think that the Church, at least in the West, needs to start asking itself questions, not about it's place within secular western culture, but how it's own culture needs to be reformulated. Are we merely pandering to our pop culture standards (at least superficially) in our worship services and in our discipleship and in our living out the commands of Christ and the examples of the Apostles and leaders of the New Testament church?
What exactly does the biblical example of being a community of believers set apart for God and His glory look like? Why do we even need to be set apart as a distinct community? What is the focus of our communities and how they look? What exactly are we hoping to accomplish through how we form our church cultures?
That's alot of questions, mostly rambling. But I think these are questions that need to be discussed, obviously I'm just mumbling into the internet, but our churches need to sit down and thoughtfully consider our own church culture. But if those few people who read our blog will humor me, I will try to think through some of the questions I mentioned, it may even turn into a short series, but who knows?
First, and I think most importantly, is our focus as a community. What is the point of our gathering? What is the reason that we meet week after week, year after year? Simply put, it is Christ. Christ is the center of our community, He is the point of all of that. Sure, we have outreach, benevolence  we have fellowship, marriages, births, funerals, graduations. But that is not the point of our gathering. "Living life together" is good, but that life needs to be the life lived in an through Christ. Philippians 1:27 says "Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel." and Jude 1:21 says "keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life" and Colossians 1:18 says "And He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent."
From just these few verses (I think) we can see that Christ is the locus of attention for the church. If we as a church community put anything else as our center, then we are no longer a church but a social club, like a facebook group. Christ is to be preeminent in everything, and if the church is His kingdom, then the King must be the focus.
The Gospel of Christ needs to be front and center and His graciousness and holiness needs to be spoken of and talked about. Our God deserves to be praised because He is the Holy One, our Redeemer and King. If all we hear of the gospel is the "altar call" then our church is doing a poor job of keeping Christ and His Gospel as the center of our church's life as a community.
If our church is centered on the pastor at all, then that man has removed the focus of the church from its rightful Shepherd to His under-shepherd. I feel blessed that at our church our pastor and elders constantly try to point to Christ instead of themselves. Our pastor constantly reminds us that it is Christ that we should focus on.
Now, most everybody knows that the Greek word used in the NT for church is ekklesia, and that this means 'gathering', 'assembly', and yes 'church'. This word has a parallel in the Old Testament, kahal. This is also a gathering, an assembly. When the people of Israel were supposed to get together for a holy assembly, it was not just to celebrate a harvest or a new moon (although it seems they did do that too). The holy assemblies were annual, cyclical. Their "church year" was a continual cycle of assemblies and feasts that served to continually remind them of God and to recount His wondrous works that He Himself performed on their behalf. It was a means to remind them, to reorient their gaze from their normal day to day schedules to focus on the God who sought them, who made a covenant with them, and who wanted to have a relationship with them.
In a recent article over at The Gospel Coalition, Psalm 78 is explored, I will not go into what the article says (it's pretty good, go read it here) but I did want to put all of Psalm 78 here, but alas, I will link to that as well (or you can actually open up a real physical Bible and read it from there). I think that this is a good example of how the assemblies of Israel were supposed to function, and how our assembling together should function. We need to be recounting the marvelous acts of our God, with the most glorious of all being the Gospel. Our communities are supposed to be focused on such marvelous retellings of God's working through history. The two ordinances (or sacraments if you want to be hipsterish, Reformed, Orthodox or Catholic) of baptism and the Lord's Supper are meant to be sermons telling of how God has acted in history. The Lord's Supper is the remembering of the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, the Gospel itself. It is an image of His broken body and spilled blood, a memorial to take us back to focusing on that historical fact. Baptism shows how God works in the lives of individuals, bringing them into the Church. So with both, the focus is on Christ, and His work. If we as small kingdom enclaves lose sight of this, then how can we say we are focusing on Christ?