Gospel Stories

By Betty Cho and Andrew Franklin

From Betty: Sterling and Sophia hoped to make enough money that day selling “Street Spirit” to feed themselves and secure lodging that night.  I suppose it’s not unusual to come across homeless people like Sterling and Sophia in the middle of the Mission District. 

What was unusual was that we stopped to notice them.

It was clear that Sterling and Sophia were destitute and I suspected that Sophia may have had some experiences with illegal substances given her shakiness on her feet, her missing teeth, and her glazed eyes but I believed them when they told us the money would go to food and shelter.  (That was also unusual for me because I confess that I am the biggest cynic when it comes to giving money to people on the streets.) 

Then, out of nowhere, I asked how we could pray for them.  That behavior was so unusual for me (at least when it comes to total strangers and seemingly random people on the street) that I felt as if I had floated outside of my body and some other force was taking over me – putting the words in my mouth, asking questions and offering encouragement. 

Sophia asked God to forgive her “bad” choices and for the encouragement to know that God will strengthen her to make better choices.  Sterling asked for wisdom and to remember that God will provide and God is sovereign. 

I couldn’t believe my ears.  I hate to admit my expectations were so low but to hear these two so clearly desire to cry out to God for forgiveness, healing, and redemption was incredibly moving to me. 

I didn’t want to just store up their prayer requests for the next time I had quiet time.  So, right there, on the corner of 16th and Mission, in broad daylight, Andrew and I prayed with them. 

We prayed out loud and we prayed boldly that God would provide, that Sophia and Sterling would know and experience the power of Jesus’ love, that they would know that Jesus’ death brings them forgiveness, grace, and redemption so that they would be strengthened to make better choices. 

And then we exchanged big hugs and Andrew and I left them in God’s hands. 

Another unusual thing?  Right before Sterling and Sophia approached us, they reached out to two other people who had also prayed with them!  As Andrew and I walked away, we could hear Sterling exclaim excitedly to Sophia, “Two prayers in a row, back to back?  Can you believe that?”

Looking back on the experience, I realize more and more that all of the seemingly unusual events that came to pass could only be explained by one person: God.  Our God is living, breathing, real…and He wants to be in relationship with each and every one of us.  He wants to love us, in and through each other.  It is AMAZING that we can pray to God, thanks to our Lord Jesus Christ, and that God HEARS us, thanks to our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

From Andrew: Please pray for Sterling and Sophia and the thousands who are in similar places.

Betty and I talk a lot about what it means to live more radically for Jesus and how we can live out the gospel in our everyday circumstances. Here, she lived this out. Where is God calling you to practice gospel incarnation, in both word and deed?

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Defining “the Gospel” Well.

Like most teachers of the Bible, I notice the word “gospel” comes out of my mouth with great frequency.  Most of the time people seem to understand what I’m talking about but, in private moments I wonder if I’ve sufficiently defined this remarkable word.  There is no doubt ― its precise meaning can be elusive.

Sometimes it seems people mean it to be a very narrow and concrete set of ideas.  Other times, it is as if the word is used to refer to “everything truly Christian.”  Is the entire Bible “the gospel?” Is each discrete section of the Bible “the gospel?”  What exactly is “the gospel?”

My suspicion is that many an eye has glazed over while listening to the preacher proclaim an ill-defined gospel.

Working through the myriad appearances of the term in the New Testament, some interesting things become apparent.  In the majority of the cases, the term is not defined at all.

On one level, this makes me feel relieved when I think of my own definitional failures.  And yet, I doubt the New Testament writers chose not to define the term with every use so they could keep it a mystery (Eph. 3:6 notwithstanding).

That the gospel is so commonly spoken of and not usually defined indicates that it was a fabulously common term and that the New Testament church would have been expected to have known what it meant.  The early church leaders must have explained it well to them.

And, given the New Testament data, it appears they did so in three principle ways.  Briefly, they are as follows:.

• In the Synoptics, the gospel is characterized as the “coming of the kingdom.”

• In Paul’s writings, the gospel is defined in two ways.  Either it is the life and message of Jesus Christ with particular emphasis on the death and resurrection (i.e. 1 Cor. 15:1-8) or simply, “the grace” of Christ or of God (Gal. 1:6, Col. 1:6).

• There is a possible fourth definition in Acts 10:36 where Luke speaks of the preaching of the “gospel of peace through Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all).”

The three primary uses of the term overlap, interrelate and mutually reinforce one another.  In fact, I’m struck not by the diversity, number and breadth of definitions but by their clarity and limitedness.  In other words, the gospel is not “everything” (although its implications may affect “everything”).

In our use of the term in the church, we would do well to reflect the biblical usage.  As such, we ought to be careful not overly to broaden the definition of the gospel and make it to mean “everything Christian,” as we might be tempted to do.  The impulse behind such usage is good: the intention is outwardly to acknowledge the centrality of the gospel in all things Christian.  The end result, however, can be a diminishing of the most important aspects of the gospel (kingdom, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and grace).

If everything is the gospel, I may be satisfied that I have proclaimed it when in fact I may merely have told a nice Bible story or talked about an aspect of the Christian faith.

Perhaps a good way forward would be to say that the gospel is (somewhat) narrow in its meaning (stick to the three definitions) while at the same time boldly insist that the implications of the gospel reach to transform all things.

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A Lesson on Radical Transparency from The Fall by Albert Camus

I’m just re-reading The Fall, by Albert Camus, the early 20th C. French Existentialist.  Since High School it has been on my shelf of “great books.”  A recent church leadership team discussion had us grappling with how we share our faith with someone who’s content, successful and seemingly doing fine “without God.”  The story of The Fall is about just such a person. Jean-Baptist Clamence is a model human being, a lawyer given to serving the poor without pay, a man who never misses an opportunity to help someone in need.  He is well liked, attractive, winsome and successful in every area of life.

But a momentary failure causes him to look a little deeper into his own soul and he discovers that under the veneer of contentedness lies a deep-seated selfishness.  This realistic self-evaluation leads to the unraveling of his confidence.  Lacking any hope of resolution, he winds up spending his life in the local dive telling the story of his “fall” to unsuspecting tourists.  Inevitably, and this is his intent, as these victims ponder the fall of one so obviously well put together, they begin to consider their own circumstance.  The self portrait he holds out “becomes a mirror” revealing the secret motives and imperfections of his listener.  The knife cuts deep.  By the time it is over, the bar floor is littered with the tattered shreds of the tourist’s smugness and pride.  Then Clamence departs leaving his victim destroyed and without hope but feeling himself personally triumphant.

The Fall gets it partly right.  Realistic self-evaluation is painful and few embrace it because it leads to a scary precipice of self-destruction.  Camus portrays this dynamic masterfully.  And he shows us how one person’s uncompromising transparency can expose another person to a more exacting version of God’s law.  This is a technique we might do well to employ with those  who seem “to have it all put together.”  Of course our aim is to bring about repentance and redemption through Christ rather than Clamence’s personal destruction.

All this will require us to expose aspects of our character that we might prefer not to expose.  Then again, Christ didn’t enjoy hanging on the cross for hanging’s sake.  There was a greater purpose and being transparent about our failures is part of how we fill up the sufferings of Christ.  Our transparency will help those around us recognize their need.  In the words of Clamence, we might say to the “perfect” people around us, “Search your memory and perhaps you will find some similar story that you’ll tell me later on.”

Rumors are that Camus himself found forgiveness in Christ while on his death bed.  It is impossible to know for sure.  But it is certainly clear that he understood the first part of the journey.

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The Gospel Coalition National Conference, April 12-14, 2011

For a few days the other week, Andrew Hoffman and I were able to go to Chicago to hear some brilliant minds and disciples of Jesus Christ talk about the Gospel; hence the name of the conference, The Gospel Coalition. (If you are unfamiliar with this, check out their website  thegospelcoalition.org  for some free sermons, book reviews and great blogs. You can also hear most of the talks from the conference.)

Here is what I am bringing home from this conference: the centrality of the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, in all things. The theme of the conference was “They Testify About Me: Preaching Jesus and the Gospel from the Old Testament.” This title, referencing John 5:39, made it very clear that the plan of the conference was to have really smart and really good preachers talk about Jesus and the Gospel. It blew me away. What I loved about this was that the speakers never forced metaphor or symbolism to say “this is Jesus here” or “this stands for Jesus.”  In a way which is more appropriate and truthful to the text, they found trajectories which all ended up at Jesus. Messages of faithfulness and hope, salvation by grace, on and on, they showed that Jesus was the “better…” or “greater…” or “final…” of what was presented in the Old Testament.

What stuck me like a bolt of lightning was when D.A. Carson said “People ask me, ‘Do I have to preach Jesus and the Gospel from the Old Testament?’ and I respond, ‘Of course I don’t have to, but why would I do anything else?”  Amen!  Why would you ever pass on an opportunity to show how countless stories of the Old Testament are preparing us, pointing us to the message of grace we find on the cross.

In this Easter season, think about the role the Gospel plays in your life. Many of you are probably like me; I’ve heard this message so much that I have forgotten how this is the most central teaching in my life – I am a sinner saved by grace through faith in our resurrected Lord, our Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth!  As soon as I returned from Chicago, I came across the words of Paul in his first letter to the church of Corinth that sum up what God showed me that week: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!”

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Which Bible Translation?

bible-languages-6001.jpgWhen the King James Version (KJV) was the only game in town, it must have been nice to have everyone literally “on the same page” during corporate Bible study.  Things couldn’t remain that way, however, because the KJV was translated using only 16 original language manuscripts and today we have uncovered 1000‘s, many of them older and better than those original 16.

By the time I was in seminary in the late 90’s, there were what I considered to be three real options: the Revised Standard Version (1952), the New American Standard Version (1971) and the New International Version (1978).  I had grown up with the RSV but in Evangelical circles this version was suspect because it sought to incorporate liberal critical theory into the translation process (although many of my most conservative professors preferred the RSV and I continued to use it during seminary and for a time afterwards).  As I began to preach regularly, I realized the RSV was not going to catch on in my particular church environment and figured it was not wise or helpful to continue to be out of step with the congregation.  The NIV and the NASB provided two fairly different but widely accepted options.  The NIV was created by translators leaning more to towards the “dynamic equivalence” translation philosophy, which seeks to re-say what the original text says in words and phrases that are natural to the host language.  Dynamic equivalence translations are also more likely to make interpretive decisions in texts where the original language might be ambiguous (although most translations end up doing this because the host language sometimes has no easy way of maintaining the ambiguity).  Such interpretive decision-making is why it matters on some level what the beliefs of the translators are.  At any rate, this philosophy of translation resulted in a punchy, readable rendering of the original languages and I chose to use it because of its natural English feel and accessibility.  Besides, I’d be studying with the original languages on hand and so would be getting the full breadth of translation possibilities.  The NASB, on the other hand, was written with a bias for “formal equivalence” (sometimes inaccurately referred to as “word for word”).  Formally equivalent translations can sound very wooden in English or even unintelligible as they seek to carry over the lexical and grammatical forms of the original language into the host language.  But if translation is about making something intelligible, there is no guarantee that simply reproducing these forms makes it more intelligible; sometimes it has the opposite effect.  So, in my mind, advantage NIV.

In the last decade, the translation options have further multiplied.  The RSV was revised to become both the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV, 1989) and the English Standard Version (ESV, 2001).  Then came the New Living Translation (NLT, 2004), Today’s New International Version (TNIV, 2005), the New English Version (NET, 2005) and soon a revision of the NIV (2011, available online now).  All these versions attempt to solve two primary translation problems: 1) how best to balance formal/dynamic equivalence translation philosophies and 2) how best to incorporate cultural changes in gender related language use.  The NRSV is an update of the RSV emphasizing the use of gender inclusive language.  Many have documented how some NRSV gender inclusive language decisions create theological confusion in places and so the NRSV has not been generally considered in Evangelical contexts.  The ESV is also a revision of the RSV, striving to maintain a balance between dynamic and formal equivalence, but with a more conservative approach to usage of gender inclusive language (it does use gender inclusive language).  The NLT is perhaps furthest on the dynamic equivalence side and, while certainly worth consulting, is not generally considered for corporate congregational use.  The TNIV was a revision of the NIV that has already gone out of print due to controversy regarding its gender inclusive language choices.  While this text was heavily criticized by the broad evangelical world, many conservative Biblical scholars who are highly trained in translation theory continue to hold the TNIV in high regard.  In surveying the debate about the TNIV it seems that while it started as a discussion among the faithful about the technicalities of gender inclusive translation theory, it ended as a somewhat politicized dispute with the majority of evangelical leaders (whether or not they were schooled in science of translation) siding against the TNIV.  While I’m not in a position to give a final ruling on that debate, it is now a mute point because the TNIV is out of print.  A new revision of the NIV is due out in 2011 and will include a reassessment of all the passages that lead to the controversy.  In the meantime, however, huge numbers of Bible readers have switched to the ESV which intends to be both faithful and readable and, as mentioned, has dealt more conservatively with the gender inclusive language question.  In addition, the publishing of the ESV Study Bible in 2008, complete with comprehensive exegetical and theological notes, has further boosted the ESV’s appeal.

Sorting it all out, it would seem that, going forward, the 2011 NIV and the ESV remain the most generally accepted options.  The question for a pastor in the daily grind of preaching and shepherding is two-fold. 1) Will the 2011 NIV be “better” than the ESV and 2) will it catch hold enough?  The second question is hard to predict given the response to the TNIV and the move of many to the ESV.  We won’t know for some years now.  With respect to the first question, however, the 2011 NIV is available online now and can be compared to the ESV.  So far, the conclusion is the same one that we get so often in biblical translation: each translation is better than the others in some ways and not in others.  I don’t particularly like, for example, that the NIV has stayed with translating “flesh” as “sinful nature” (although, after an in-depth reading of the rationale behind it, I have a much greater respect for this decision).  In other cases, it seems the 2011 NIV takes a more consistent approach to the inclusive language problem (cf. Hebrews 2:11 and 3:1 in ESV and 2011 NIV, for example).  On balance, however, I moderately prefer the overall philosophy of the ESV (generally seeking to “interpret” less, maintain ambiguities and leave more for the reader to figure out).  I can live with its imperfection (but I could live with the imperfections of the 2011 NIV and many of the other translations as well).

In all this, it is crucial to keep several points in mind. For the past months, I’ve been doing devotions and studying with four or five versions in parallel plus the original language text and have come to this conclusion: no translation is perfect.  But, since I can’t mix and match my Bibles on the fly, I have to choose one.  On balance, I choose the ESV.  At the same time, I/we must remember what a luxury it is to choose!  Instead of 16 lower quality manuscripts as was the case with the KJV, the Bible I read is based on 1000‘s of manuscripts, many of them of extremely high quality.  Not only that, generations of scholars have combed through these manuscripts and wrestled deeply to determine the best way to express in English the words of the original language.  This is a luxury very few Christians in history have had.  Lastly, we shouldn’t be put off by all the different versions and their accompanying philosophical differences.  What this says is that we are a people who take the word of God very seriously.  We want to know it faithfully.  We want to read it in the best possible way.  As long as that remains true, we can only be hopeful.   

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I’m a Christian, Now What? (Part 3)

You’ve just taken the big step.  You placed your faith in Jesus Christ.  You are probably wondering what’s next.  The first answer is that there are a lot of things you could do.  This is a relationship with a living God, not a to-do list.  But, there are a few important concepts to incorporate into your thinking.  You’ll find these concepts throughout scripture, developed in various ways.  We are going to explore them as they appear in the second part of the book of Romans (chapters 5-8).  In the first part  Romans (chapters 1-4), the Apostle Paul describes what the gospel is: the grace of God made available in Jesus Christ.  For the purpose of this blog entry, I’m assuming you have a basic understanding of the gospel and that you have received Christ Jesus as your Lord and your Savior.  Now you need to understand what is next, what the gospel does to you.  This is the subject of Romans 5-8.  We will examine this text in four parts.Part 3: New PowerGod’s gifts of new identity and new purpose are apparently not enough.  He also gives us a new power to become the people we were meant to be.  Carl Sandburg said, “There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippo who wants to wallow in the mud.”  We might know that in Christ we’ve become eagles, we might understand that our new purpose is to fly but we often find we can’t get off the ground.  Eagles are powerful creatures, but the eagle in us can’t lift the hippo.  We need power from the outside.  Jesus brings that power through the Holy Spirit.  “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you” (Romans 8:11).  The same power that raised Christ from the dead is now at work in us, since we’ve been cleansed by the work of Christ and thereby made fit to be temples of God.But how do we access that power?  Ultimately, it is the power of God that accesses us.  Empowerment is first and foremost God’s work.  And yet, it is possible to place ourselves in the path of that empowerment.  As some have said, we don’t make the wind, but we can throw up a sail.  There are many ways to do so but Paul gives two in this text.  First, we can live by the Spirit (8:4).  The word “live” can also be translated “walk,” in the sense of strolling around (a market place, for example).  Most of us “live” at such a pace and with such blinders that no outside influence can grab our attention, including the Holy Spirit.  We access the power of the Spirit by slowing down and remaining open to his promptings.  Second, we access the power of the Spirit by setting our minds on the things of the Spirit (8:5).  This is not positive thinking, this is setting the mind on the things of the Spirit so that we’re ready to see and seize upon the movement of the Spirit when it comes.  We don’t determine the movement of the Spirit but we can be alert so that we notice when the Spirit starts to move in a particular direction.  And if you find you don’t know what the things of the Spirit are, this is where Scripture study becomes critical.  The more familiar we become with the personality of the Holy Spirit, the quicker we are to recognize his presence.And when he is present, he brings the strength to lift the eagle above the hippo, just like he lifted Christ from the grave.  So know that there is a new power available in the Holy Spirit.  Listen for his movements and become familiar with his ways.

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There will come a time, you’ll see

When I was given the chance to preach a couple of weeks back, I was debating playing a recorded song. The song had spoken to me strongly and profoundly when I first heard it and perhaps stronger when I thought of it in context of heaven. The band is a folk-rock group out of London called Mumford and Sons. You can listen to the song here. The song is called “After the Storm” and the line that continues to grab me goes like this

And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

I have grown weary in failure and frustrated at a lack of consistency in my ability to love my neighbors. Clear is the command of Jesus that we are to Love God and Love others; the beauty is in the simplicity of these words but only once a human attempts to live this out does he or she discover the monumental task at hand. I constantly fail my friends and family and vice versa. My good intentions to serve go awry when there is a hint of pride, self-service and arrogance. My idea of sacrificing for a brother or sister is tainted by an expectation to get something in return. A friend lent me a great book that explained this better than I could. The following is an excerpt from Henri J.M. Nouwen’s In the name of Jesus (p. 38).

[There is an] unconditional love [that] the evangelist John calls God’s first love. “Let us love,” he says, “because God loved us first” (I John 4:19). The love that often leaves us doubtful, frustrated, angry, and resentful is the second love, that is to say, the affirmation, affection, sympathy, encouragement, and support we receive from out parents, teachers, spouses, and friends. We all know how limited, broken, and very fragile that love is. Behind the many expressions of this second love there is always the chance of rejection, withdrawal, punishment, blackmail, violence, and even hatred. … These are all the shadow side of the second love and reveal the darkness that never completely leaves the human heart.

Nouwen goes on and provides hope to all who have experienced the aforementioned (p. 40)

The radical good news is that the second love is only a broken reflection of the first love and that the first love is offered to us by a God in whom there are no shadows.

My nature, human nature in general, is often reactionary. I am driven to do things because someone did something first for me. The reason we love God is because He first loved us. His love is perfect and without shadows, as Nouwen put it; it was not spurred on by anything we did; it came from His nature and His nature is love (I John 4:8). We can never match this love because His was first, and ours was a reaction. As I mentioned before, my discouragement with my incomplete love exists but it is overwhelmed by hope! Finally the lyrics of this song become relevant. “There will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears and love will not break your heart but dismiss your fears.” There is a day in which this second love, the human love, will become like the first love. A day when we are face to face with Jesus and he gives that sweet first love which was always there, yet the love we return is just as sweet. We must live in constant awareness of our task to love God and our neighbors and not give up because we can never fully do so. Be encouraged by the knowledge that when we get over our hill as the song says, over our life here on earth, He waits for us to love and be loved perfectly.

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I’m a Christian, Now What? (Part 2)

You’ve just taken the big step.  You placed your faith in Jesus Christ.  You are probably wondering what’s next.  The first answer is that there are a lot of things you could do.  This is a relationship with a living God, not a to-do list.  But, there are a few important concepts to incorporate into your thinking.  You’ll find these concepts throughout scripture, developed in various ways.  We are going to explore them as they appear in the book of Romans, chapters 5-8.  In Romans 1-4, the Apostle Paul describes what the gospel is: the grace of God made available in Jesus Christ.  For the purpose of this blog, I’m assuming you have a basic understanding of the gospel and that you have received Christ Jesus as your Lord and your Savior.  Now you need to understand what the gospel does to you.  This is the subject of Romans 5-8.  We will examine this text in four parts.

Part 2: New Purpose
A new identity (see part 1) leads to a new way of living focused around a new purpose.  Romans 6:15-23 explains this purpose using slavery terminology.  Whereas we once were slaves to sin, we are now slaves to God.  Slavery of any kind sounds offensive at first but it is an effective way to communicate the extent to which God wishes to have authority in our lives.  He wants everything.  This sounds radical but remember, this is the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God who made you in the first place and who is now calling you to give yourself back to him.  He knows better than you do what you need to thrive.  This is one case where slavery is a good thing.

I wear around a signet ring with a cross on it.  It is something I started doing around my tenth anniversary in ministry.  It was inspired by a journal entry I wrote as I pondered God’s calling for the next ten years of my life.  In that entry, I admonished myself to, “Look at what you have, all of it, as belonging to God.”  The signet ring serves as a reminder that who I am and what I do belongs to God.  The stamp on it is not an “A” for Andrew, but a cross for Christ.  I don’t belong to myself or to any other person or movement in this world.  I belong to Christ.  All of me.  My purpose is to serve him.

Such radicalism may be hard to embrace.  Becoming a slave to Christ is a process (and I, for one, have a long, long way to go).  But you can accelerate this process consistently challenging yourself to take spiritual risks.  Experiment with your relationship with God this week.  What can you enslave to Christ right now?  Time, treasure, talent, heart, soul, strength or mind?  Take a risk and see what it is like to live under a new master.  And as you begin to experience his goodness, you will be inspired to give him more and more.  In the often paradoxical outworking of the God’s ways, it is in this “slavery” that you will find true freedom.

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Good Friday?

by Peter Konz

cross-thorns-small.jpgI don’t know about you, but I sometimes have trouble wrapping my head around “Good Friday.”  Not in what God wrought, but more in the name.  It seems a paradox when we consider the trial and passion of our Lord, to think of it as good. It is in fact a time of mourning and sorrow.  It is a time to consider how human sin caused this death.  But it is also a time for us to remember God’s great love for us that He should submit and be obedient unto death for us.  It is in that way a “Good Friday” for us as we take this time to be reminded of this great love for us and to commemorate the wonder of it all.

For centuries the Church has commemorated this day in a multitude of ways.  Through history it has been a time of fasting and abstinence, a laying aside of ourselves to consider how Jesus laid aside himself for us.  St.  Augustine wrote this about Good Friday:  “For us he was unto thee both the victor and the victim, and therefore the victor, because he was the victim for us he was unto thee both Priest and the sacrifice, and therefore the Priest, because he was the sacrifice… I meditate upon the price of my redemption”  (Confessions X, xliii).However you choose to lay yourself aside this day, take the time to remember Him and what He has done.  Below is an outline for Good Friday devotions.Good Friday Devotional Outline (Printable Version)Morning

  1. Ask God to help you lay aside yourself and to give this day to Him. Let His Spirit lead and open your heart to Him.
  2. Read Psalm 22 and Psalm 54
  3. Consider how God brought this about for you and the entire world
  4. As the Lord speaks to you, take time to journal and or draw something that God has shared with you.
  5. As God opens your heart let Him lead you to prayer.  Pray for what He places utmost upon your heart.

Noon

  1. Ask God to draw you to and into His word, ask Him to speak to you by His Spirit and His word.
  2. Read Lamentations 3:1-9, 3:19-33 and I Peter 1: 10-20
  3. Consider how it is that God brought you to himself and continues to work in your life
  4. What stands out for you? Ask God about those things.
  5. Pray for those who are in need of Jesus.

Evening

  1. Read John 13:36-38 and Matthew 27:45-50
  2. Ask God to bring to mind all that He has put on your heart this day.
  3. Pray

Note on Fasting:If you feel led to fast, we recommend a fast from solid foods beginning when you wake up and ending after the prayer meeting on Friday night.  In place of breakfast and lunch, read scripture and pray (using the above devotional).  If you do choose to fast, make sure to drink lots of liquids.  Keep your head up, don’t complain (Matthew 6:16-18), replace each hunger pang with a prayer and pay attention to Christ’s movement throughout the day.We’ll be gathering for prayer and a meal on Good Friday at Solano Church in Albany.

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I’m a Christian, Now What? (Part 1)

You’ve just taken the big step.  You placed your faith in Jesus Christ.  You are probably wondering what’s next.  The first answer is that there are a lot of things you could do.  This is a relationship with a living God, not a to-do list.  But, there are a few important concepts to ponder.  You’ll find these concepts throughout scripture, developed in various ways.  We are going to explore them as they appear in the book of Romans, chapters 5-8.  In Romans 1-4, the Apostle Paul describes what the gospel is: the grace of God made available in Jesus Christ.  For the purpose of this blog, I’m assuming you have a basic understanding of the gospel and that you have received Christ Jesus as your Lord and your Savior.  Now you need to understand what the gospel does to you.  This is the subject of Romans 5-8.  We will examine this text in four parts.Part One: New PersonhoodRomans 5-6 tells of a simple truth.  When the gospel comes into your life, you become a new person.  You used to be a slave to sin.  Now you have died to sin and so are no longer a slave to it (6:6).  You have gone from slavery to freedom.  You have a new identity.  Of course, you still struggle with sin.  That’s because you have not yet fully embraced your new identity.  A slave who’s lived a lifetime of subservience to a harsh master often finds it difficult, even uncomfortable, to embrace a sudden freedom.  The impulse to acquiesce lingers on.  A familiar hell sometimes wins out over an unfamiliar heaven.I think this is why Paul highlights baptism in the discussion of the new personhood Christ brings (6:1-5).  Baptism is a means for driving home the point that we’ve been given a new identity.  Baptism symbolizes our union with Christ in his 1) death (dunking), 2) burial (submersion) and 3) resurrection (emergence from the water).  A person is baptized in front of his or her family and loved ones and they serve as witnesses to the fact that a new identity has come.  The deeper the impression of this new identity, the stronger the impulse to live according to it, in freedom and newness.  The gospel changes us, in part, by bringing us a new identity.  But this is an identity that we need to come to embrace.”I’m a Christian, now what?” you ask.  Be baptized.  Let your community help you embrace your new identity.hand-in-water.jpg

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