The Neglected Understood

Stay Away from Jesus

January 26, 2012

Matt Papa is offering a song from his new album for free. The song is an amazingly bold song full of neglected biblical truth. Here are some of the lyrics:

You won’t ever hear this song on Christian radio
Cause the Jesus that I serve is not safe
He’ll say take Your cross and die
So if you want a comfy life
Stay away from Jesus

He says narrow is the gate and hard is the way
Hate the ones you love and love the ones you hate

Eat my flesh and drink my blood

But if your works are good enough

Stay away from Jesus

He says be either hot or cold,

you can’t serve God and gold

Indifference is the road that leads to hell

 So if you’re happy in your stuff

 and if 10%’s enough
Stay away from Jesus

He has also posted some insightful articles on music and worship on his blog (expressing some of the same thoughts I’ve had about pop Christian radio). I plan to spend some time reading more of them at a later date, but here are some of his more recent ones:

1. Meet the Golden Calf of Christian Radio

Christian radio, therefore, is for the most part an altar where chipper, inauthentic, boring, unscriptural, untruthful, gospel-absent, ear-tickling, man-centered songs offered to an idol named Becky.

2. An Appeal to Christian Radio and its Listeners

Mainstream christian radio is altogether banal and shallow in both a musical sense and a spiritual sense. The songs are man-centered and the DJ’s and radio programmers are man-pleasers…..they play the songs that will attract the most listeners to their station, period. Christian radio is like Joel Osteen in musical form….safe, happy, and untruthful. It is the TBN of music…a large-scale, embarrassing presentation of Christianity to the world.

3. If there’s not Scripture in the Worship Set, Then it’s not Really a Worship Set

HT: Z

Foster Care: Adoption and Reconciliation

January 22, 2012

Last night, Michelle and I received the Decrees of Adoption for Tate and Jazzy. Needless to say, we are overjoyed.

We praise God for giving two wretched, self-centered sinners the desire to love children in the foster care system.
We praise God for the initial encouragement to pursue foster care from our good friends, Shean and Angie.
We praise God for the continual support and love from family and friends.
We praise God for the joyful examples set for us by members of our church.
We praise God for the diligent training from and work by the Forsyth County DSS.

We involved ourselves in foster care with the main motivation of demonstrating the beauty of the Gospel to the children placed with us, to their families, to social workers, and to people watching us. We deeply desired to portray the Gospel by loving children who did not necessarily “deserve” our love as God loved and adopted us, sinners definitely undeserving of His love. I always viewed adoption, the final result in our case, as a picture of the Gospel, but never thought about the Gospel ramifications when foster care does not end in adoption (in our training, the DSS workers emphasized that the main purpose of foster care was reunification with the biological family).

Rob Tims wrote an excellent article on foster care from a Gospel-centered perspective. His family’s experience with foster care did not end as ours did. As he points out, foster care pictures the Gospel even when adoption is not the final result:

Reconciliation and adoption are equally powerful pictures of the Gospel. One of the main reasons we were motivated to enter into the foster care system was because our efforts to adopt internationally were failing. We were seeking to adopt internationally for a lot of reasons, but one of those is because of the way adoption communicates the Gospel. As Paul says in Ephesians 1:5, “In love, he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.” Therefore, when the two girls we received had no parental contact for nearly 6 months, and the foster care review board twice recommended termination of parental rights, we were gearing up for a family-based proclamation of the Gospel through adoption.

Now, as the girls head home, our family is still proclaiming the Gospel, only through reconciliation instead of adoption. In 2 Corinthians 5:11-21, Paul says that the good news of Jesus is a message of reconciliation. Verses 18-19 are especially relevant. “(God) through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” The girls we have had for the last 15 months have had a fractured relationship with their mother. Rather than giving our family the ministry of adoption, God gave us the ministry of reconciliation. We’ve been blessed to play a Christ-like role in reconciling these girls back to their mom and other extended family members, and that is an equally powerful proclamation of who Jesus is and what He’s done. That’s why this next point is also true.

Please consider portraying the Gospel through foster care; whether it be through reconciliation or adoption. Tims continues:

The foster-care system in the United States is in real need of Gospel-centered families to infiltrate the system and take in hurting kids who need unconditional love. Adoption is hugely popular is evangelical circles, but foster care less so. Because the ministry of reconciliation is just as powerful as the ministry of adoption at communicating and living the Gospel, I would urge as many as I could to take the plunge into foster care.

I have a much better understanding of the risks and rewards of partnering with a pagan government to achieve Gospel-centered results, and my final analysis is this: get involved! Yes, it can and will be frustrating to work with an under-funded agency for something that matters so much. It will break your heart to see the emotional and mental anguish in children as they are tugged between parents in rehabilitation and foster parents willing to adopt them. It will shatter your concept of “ministry” to turn your home … your entire life … into the place where you “do it,” as opposed to an hour or so on Sunday or Wednesday.

HT: Z

Two Responses to “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” Video

January 13, 2012

The “Jesus > Religion” Video includes a few great points, but fails with others.

When I first saw the video I was tempted to post it here with a few cautions. I am strapped for time, but what others have said is sufficient.

Here is the video:

Here are the cautions:

From Jared Wilson

Some make a boogeyman out of the idea of “religious people,” by which it becomes clear what they mean is “traditional people” or the uncool. My feeling is that the Bible-thumping, starched suit-wearing, hellfire and brimstone religious people taking the fun out of fundamentalism are becoming fewer and farther between, while the church is brimming with self-righteous hipsters and cooler-than-thous. The Pharisees look like Vampire Weekend now. I’m not saying Jefferson is one of those guys; I’m just saying he’s offering them red meat.

The way the fellow in the video defines religion, he is right to hate it. But the more he goes on, the less justification he’s got for using the word religion. It’s not religion that does all those things. It’s not even the Law that does all those things. The Law is good! (See Romans 7:12, for instance, or 1 Timothy 1:18.) It’s self-righteousness that does all those things. Religion is not, as the fellow says, a man-made invention: legalism is. And even as the Scriptures tell us the harsh things the Law does, it never gives us license to hate it. So it’s not the Law or religion the Bible is against, but legalism and “self-made religion” (Colossians 2:23).

And the really controversial point we ought to make is this: Jesus did not hate religion. He was in fact a religious person.

From Jonathan Fitzgerald

Bethke doesn’t mean religion either, but he’s rehearsing a popular evangelical trope, that the freedom that Christians find through Jesus is freedom from structure, organization, and authority. Of course, Bethke, like all Christians, is a member of a religion. . . . What Bethke is actually railing against is people whose expression of religion doesn’t look like he believes it should. Thus, rather than discounting religion, he is just discounting other religions, or even just other manifestations of his own religion. . . . here Bethke is doing far more harm than good by playing into hurtful stereotypes about religion–his religion and mine, as well as the other major world religions. Denouncing this video takes stepping outside of evangelical subculture to see its actual implications beyond our little playground, but doing so, I think, is extremely important.

HT: JS

Grief and Joy on Christmas

January 3, 2012

My good friend, Mark Reed, lost his mother to a stroke on Christmas. He wrote about the experience on his blog.

He concludes:

The incarnation of Christ was my rock, my confidence, my peace, and my joy this year like never before. My mother is face to face with her Savior because that Savior was born to live and die for her some 2000 years ago. I pray that all of you had as good of a Christmas as I did this year!

Praise God for giving him the grace to write these words.