Thinking Christian

From OneNewsNow.com:

A new study shows that people of faith in America have a huge heart in terms of giving to Third World countries — and the study cites a surprising dollar figure.

Carol Adelman of the Hudson Institute cites the information in a study done with Notre Dame University. “We didn’t realize it would be as large as it was, and we came out with a number of $8.8 billion worth of goods and services that churches are giving overseas to developing countries,” she points out.

That figure represents nearly 40 percent of the foreign aid provided by the United States to the same region — and the money from churches is apparently doing a lot of good, says Adelman….

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith | 2 Comments »

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”

I ran across that rather jarring statement the other day on the Internet. It came from the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), an extraordinarily intelligent man — and a very vocal atheist.

Those are the opening lines of my guest column today at the Newport News Daily Press: “There’s No ‘Intelligence Test’ for the Family of God.” I invite you to take a look at it.

(That link will expire in a few weeks. The article is also available permanently in PDF form here.)

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith | 6 Comments »

Book Review

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Revised and Expanded Edition), by Philip Jenkins

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State; the book is published by Oxford University Press. With that set of credentials it’s hard simply to sweep aside the rather astonishing central theses of his book:

“The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning. The fact of change is itself undeniable: it has happened, and will continue to happen.”

There is a worldwide sociological shift going on virtually unnoticed even by Christian historians and observers. It is perhaps most strikingly highlighted by:

The theological coloring of the most successful new churches reminds us once more of the massive gap in most Western listings of the major trends of the last century, which rightly devoted much space to political movements such as fascism and communism but ignored such vital religious currents as Pentecostalism. Yet today, fascists or Nazis are not easy to find, and communists are becoming an endangered species, while Pentecostals are flourishing around the globe. Since there were only a handful of Pentecostals in 1900, and several hundred million today, is it not reasonable to identify this as perhaps the most successful social movement of the past century? According to current projections, the number of Pentecostal believers should cross the one billion mark before 2050.

But the book is not entirely about Pentecostals, and it is not entirely about the movement of Christianity south from Europe and North America. Jenkins explains how Christianity is in many ways returning to its homeland. Founded in the ancient near east, its earliest reach was greater toward the south and east than northwest into Europe. Jenkins’s definition of Christianity is broad, encompassing notional believers (i.e., “Christians” ranging from genuine believers to those whose claim to Christian connections is merely traditional or cultural) in the Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Coptic, and Ethiopian traditions, and even Indian churches tracing their roots to the apostle Thomas, and heretical branches like the Nestorians.

It’s a broad perspective, yet this is still a surprise:

On balance, I would argue that at the time of the Magna Carta or the Crusades if we imagine a typical Christian, we should still be thinking not of a French artisan but of a Syrian peasant or Mesopotamian town-dweller, an Asian not a European.

Which leads to the provocative suggestion,

A powerful social movement has demeanded that the West and specifically the churches apologize for the medieval crusading movement. In this view the Crusades represented aggression, pure and simple, against the Muslim world…. An equally good case could be made that the medieval MIddle East was no more inevitably Muslim than other regions conquered by Islam and subsequently liberated, such as Spain and Hungary…. Westerners have simply forgotten the once-great Christian communities of the Eastern world.

To which I plead guilty, in spite of having studied church history in school and having read Latourette’s 2-volume history of Christianity. In fact, all through this book I was confronted with completely new information, to a most humbling extent. I work in a mission agency–mostly on the U.S. side of the work, but I still get worldwide reports. Yet I still have had nothing at all like a true conception of what God is doing all over the world.

Bearing in mind Jenkins’s broad definition of Christianity, here is the picture as it was in 2005 and is projected to be in 2025 (based on figures on page 2):

The figures total 2.1 billion Christians in 2005, and some 2.6 billion about 17 years from now. North America and Europe already comprise only 38% of Christians; in a few years that will drop to 34%. Europe is now the most populous Christian continent, but it is also infamously the most nominal Christian region of the world. A count of those who consider themselves Christian by more than cultural heritage would drop their percentage by at least 80% to 90%. Churches in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, on the other hand, are thriving.

Southern Christianity tends to be considerably more conservative theologically than northern. This, at least, has hit the major media, as African Anglican Church leaders have made their opposition to liberal social practices strongly felt. They are far more likely to be Pentecostal. They expect God to work in signs, wonders, and visions–and they see it happening. Latin America is becoming more Pentecostal than Catholic. They are sending missionaries north and west. The largest church in London today is led by a Nigerian pastor. They are struggling for elbow room with Muslims, and often, as in Darfur and previously in Rwanda, suffering incredible persecution. They are the face of Christianity, far more so than one like me.

This can only be heartening for those of us who have dreamed of and devoted our lives to sharing the message of Jesus Christ with everyone around the world. Heartening–and humbling. God is at work. Those of us standing far out on the fringes of Christendom–like myself, here in the virtual Bible Belt area of Virginia, U.S.A.–hardly have a clue.

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Revised and Expanded Edition), by Philip Jenkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 261 pages plus 45 pages of endnotes, plus index. Amazon Price US$14.95

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith | 4 Comments »

I gave this talk at Seaford Baptist Church on Wednesday, April 23, 2008. Some portions have been edited out because they’re not applicable to a wider audience. 

Option-Click (Mac) or Right-Click (Mac or PC) to Download mp3, or listen directly online:

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith & Evidences | 3 Comments »

I’ve had to do an inordinate amount of maintenance on this blog, because its back end (writing and managing posts) has not been working properly. As I’m doing this maintenance, I’m changing the theme (the overall look) and the comment functions frequently. I apologize for any confusion this may cause.

Update: After an hour or two of work, I can’t solve this. I’m wondering if there’s a problem with the server (ISP).

Until I get another chance to work on this, be advised that I’ll have to turn off comment preview and comment editing every time I post or edit a blog entry. It won’t work at all otherwise, so it’s unavoidable.

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith | No Comments »

My daughter turns 13 today–we have all teenagers in the family now.

I think our kids are just about the greatest anywhere–even as teenagers! I have intentionally avoided talking about them much here, as a matter of their privacy. If you only knew, though, how much they’ve gone through at school, and how they’ve had to learn to process pain and disappointment. They’re learning faith and forgiveness through it. That’s about all I ought to say… except we sure thank God for his work in and through them.

P.S. By the way, we’ve been on the road all week, visiting family and ministry partners in Michigan, which is why my blogging has been slow. We’ll be home in a few hours. (I don’t announce our travels here for the same reason I don’t hang a sign on our front door that says we’re gone.) My sister Kathy, who sustained a very critical head injury last September, is still progressing far better than anyone had expected. Cognitively she made a full recovery in a very short time. She could still use your prayers for relief of pain and for enough strength to be able to leave her wheelchair. Thanks.

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith | 3 Comments »

Several commenters have raised questions about God and spirituality from a New Age perspective in the past two weeks. Anna’s is the most trenchant:

Who is God? Good question. Who really knows? I believe God to be overall consciousness. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Bereket Teka had already offered an opinion:

Man is a thinking being, brought forth (or created) from a higher and supreme thinking being (God). As man can think and create his own reality, so can the “Universe” - which I prefer to claim it to be God, in his Omniscient presence in the universe. So, yes one can think and create his own reality - a reality that is governed by the highest thinking being and in accordance to the will and purpose of God.

I find that to be rather vague, and much too closely tied to the so-called “Law of Attraction” which claims we can create reality by our thinking. “Who is God?” remains a good question. We could back that up another step to “How could we even know the answer?”

Here’s what I find when I read New Age spirituality books: a whole lot of assertion, and little to support it. I’ve already expressed my strong doubts about Rhonda Byrne’s understanding of physics. She invents a whole new class of “energy” and makes unsupportable claims on its behalf. How does she know this energy exists? Her book, The Secret, is long on assertion and very short on solid evidence. Its appeal is to desire rather than to reason. As Henry Cloud has pointed out, that is not all wrong. Yet it is suspiciously convenient: believe that you are “God in a physical body,” and that “The earth turns on its orbit for You, The oceans ebb and flow for You,” and you can make your life anything you want it to be.

But I believe in the God of the Bible, about whom the same question is very frequently asked. How do we know this God is real? Proofs that can satisfy every mind do not exist, but in contrast to New Age spirituality, there is at least a plethora of strong evidence (see here and here for starters).

And who is this God of the Bible? He is actually the satisfaction of every true desire. New Age spirituality does not go wrong in seeking personal fulfillment. The true God is, however, the fulfillment of true desire, whereas much (most?) human desire is marred by counterfeit feelings and wishes. God is true love, true joy, true wisdom and knowledge, true mercy. These are commonly mentioned goods in the New Age literature, and yet books like The Secret settle for surface satisfaction. Why settle for money or comfort when you can have a forever relationship with the great and loving God of the universe? Why should we, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, reject God’s offer of a holiday at the seashore because we’re so enamored of making mud pies in the slum?

He is also Creator, and he stands in a position of Other next to his creation. He is an absolutely intimately, lovingly, connected other; but his relationship to creation is not sameness but of connected love. The closest analogies to that in human experience might be that of artist to painting, composer to music, sculptor to sculpture; and yet also in a different way parent to child. The artistic creator is not the artistic creation, but is indelibly expressed throughout. The parent is not the child but loves her with an unmatched devotion. God as creator shares in and is the perfect expression of these.

He is also true personhood, the ultimate expression of a Self. Compared to this, New Age belief that “all is one, God is all, all is God,” falls far short. Christianity teaches a relationship with God in which love is celebrated, not obliterated by the annihilation of self as in New Age.

He is also true justice, based on true holiness. Holiness in this context means God is morally perfect. He cannot do wrong, because his nature is fully good, unmixed with evil, not marred by rebellion as ours is. His justice flows from this: where evil exists, it is inexorably dealt with, for he cannot condone evil

God is not, then, the fulfillment of false desires: the desire for independence from our Creator, the desire to harm self or others, the desire for power and prestige for their own sakes, the desire to control others, or desires for many other kinds of satisfaction outside the context for which they were created. We believe we can get what we want apart from God. That cannot be, though: he did not create us that way. Yet we proceed on that false basis and violate God’s holiness. We deserve his justice.

Yet he is also true mercy, through the work of Jesus Christ. Christ was in fact God in the flesh. In him we can see the fullness of God’s moral perfection; we see the character of God. Always loving, always teaching, sometimes rebuking, always standing for true worship of the true God; always standing against hypocrisy and perversion of religion; never compromising; so thoroughly unwilling to bend on these principles that he was killed by the enemies he made in the process. Even his death was in his plan, though. Through it he paid the penalty demanded by God’s justice for our rebellion, so that, justice being satisfied, God can express his mercy toward those who accept Christ’s work for them.

Jesus Christ is also the ultimate answer to “Who is God, and how would we know?” He said he was God in the flesh, and he backed it up through his perfection of life, his miracles, and ultimately his resurrection from the grave. Seeing his character, we know much about the character of God. Seeing his works, we have strong confidence that we are in touch with truth.

This God is not one we would have made up. He is not molded to our everyday surface wishes. He is a God whose awesome power, otherness, and justice are to be “feared:” to be held in absolute, terrific awe and reverence, knowing how much more infinitely great and good he is than us. He makes strong demands upon us: he demands that we live according to the plan for which he created us. He metes out justice where we fail to meet his demands. In his love, through Christ, he takes the payment of justice upon himself. Then he helps us meet those demands and we discover what they are, and discover more of what God is through them: His demand, ultimately, is that we live for the greatest and deepest possible love and joy.

The pantheistic “God” of New Age spirituality already seemed exceedingly unlikely. Now, in comparison to the true God, this false god also seems bland, pale, and boring.

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith & New Age | 3 Comments »

Dr. Henry Cloud’s DVD on The Secret Things of God has been available for just a few weeks now. It’s a teaching DVD, based on a book of the same name. It’s well worth viewing. It’s worthwhile on one important level, in that he’s an entertaining speaker–he has a sense of humor and a long list of great stories to tell. More importantly, he has unusual insight into what makes people tick.

I’ve worked with Dr. Cloud on many occasions. A Christian psychologist who has an outstanding grip on how to interpret modern psychology within a solid Biblical worldview framework, he has consulted with our mission agency regarding many team issues and personnel matters. He and John Townsend co-authored the multi-million selling Boundaries. Three of Cloud’s lesser-known books comprise a strong Biblical theology of personal growth character development, and leadership. They are, respectively, Changes That Heal, How People Grow (with John Townsend), and Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality. Working with him, I had the opportunity to develop a leadership assessment based partly on the Changes That Heal model, which for a while was a part of his Ultimate Leadership workshops.

The Secret Things of God is a response to Rhonda Byrne’s New Age bestseller, The Secret. Byrne claims to have discovered a revolutionary new way for all of us to get just what we want out of life: “The Law of Attraction.”

“When you think about and feel those good things that you want, you have immediately tuned yourself to that frequency, which then causes the energy of all those things to vibrate to you, and they appear in your life. The law of attraction says that like attracts like. You are an energy magnet, so you electrically energize everything to you and electrically energize yourself to everything you want. Human beings manage their own magnetizing energy, because no one outside of them can think or feel for them, and it is thoughts and feelings that create our frequencies.”

I’ve already reviewed her book on this blog. Most of it is, to put it mildly, rampant nonsense; but that didn’t stop it from being a wild sales success. I had to wonder why so many people would go for it. When I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Cloud about it, that was the first question I asked him. (The interview was not taped, so his answers here are as I transcribed and later edited them.)

You would not be able to sell a book that says if you crack an egg on your head, you’ll become a happy person. There has to be enough truth, or viability to intersect with people’s experience so they don’t think it’s a total kook job. It’s a broadly documented position that how we think affects outcomes. We have research in performance, as in the sales industry, that Optimistic vs. Pessimistic thinking styles really make a difference. The dumb optimists blow the smart pessimists out of the water all the time.

In clinical syndromes, changing thinking is a huge part of overcoming even clinical problems. So we begin with why would people even be open to it? It begins with an idea people can resonate with, and it’s “Oh, it’s all in my head.”

But that begins to break down, in that we do not control external reality, as has been often documented. So how can you take a plausible, verifiable starting point and get them to buy into the whole package? That’s the question.

The book has two other “hooks:” everybody, at some time in their lives, has wondered is there something beyond the material world I can see, the transcendent metaphysical question. The Secret says it’s the Law of Attraction. It’s impersonal, it doesn’t ask anything of you, it leaves you alone, it does what it does–like gravity.

And then–this may be one of the strongest motivators–is the book promises to be able to render an effect in the areas of life you care most deeply about–relationships, feeling, success.

Other than it’s a New Age bestseller that you disagree with, what have you been seeing in people that led you to write The Secret Things of God?

There were a number of books immediately written to bash it, to show disagreements. That was not why I wrote my book. I was contacted by the publisher of The Secret (Simon and Schuster). They were originally thinking that it says a lot of the things that intersect with what the Bible says, and they asked me to write the Christian version of The Secret, and show where The Secret came from the Bible. I said there are some areas where The Secret comes from the Bible, but there are many areas where it diverges….

We have a culture like what Paul saw in Acts 17, a very spiritual culture. You don’t get much argument about, “is spirituality or metaphysics viable.” To me, it was just like when Paul went to Athens. They’re interested in spiritual matters. These books sell millions of copies. The Secret is like the monument to the unknown God. And Paul says this God can be known, he’s right around us, and not only that, there are laws and “secrets” in the Bible that govern how you feel, how you succeed. They’re built in by the Designer, and they’re not really secrets.

Regarding the DVD, after the book came out and did well, Fox said they wanted to distribute a DVD short film on it, and what I decided to do with that was not to take a particularly sectarian approach, but to communicate that these laws are transcendent, whether you believe in them or not, whether you believe in a designer or not.

So I went and interviewed experts in all walks of life who have experience in the validity of these principles, whether or not they’re Christians…. The research validates God’s ways. “If you don’t believe me, believe the works I do.” “If you hold to my teachings, you’ll know the truth and the truth will set me free.” My point in this was God has given us his ways, try these teachings, find out, and you’ll find out God’s ways are true and it’s not stuff a bunch of guys made up.

You cover a number of principles on the DVD for “unlocking the treasures reserved for us.” Is one of them more urgent than any other in today’s culture? If you had to limit your message to just one of the points, which would it be?

There actually is. The problem is, it’s paradoxical; so people do not experience it as the most urgent. What I talk about in the book is there’s a secret that unlocks the others, the meta-secret, which is trust. For life to be in concert with its design, and for you to grow and your life to enlarge, and for you to get better, you must open yourself up to power sources and information sources outside yourself. And no matter what anybody is doing, if they are living the closed-circle individualistic “I’m-going-to-do-it-my-own-way” kind of life, no matter what it ultimately implodes.

But that doesn’t give people the answer they want. For example, I knew a guy who was starting a new company in an industry where he had been very successful. He went to someone else who had started another company in the same industry. He asked for advice, and the answer he was given was, “I put together a group of very wise people who would support me, give me good feedback, hold me accountable; and you need a support system where you get truth spoken into your life first.” The first guy was upset. He wanted practical stuff, tactical advice. And he went off and started doing his plan basically wise unto himself. Within a couple years was bankrupt. He had made millions and millions when he had the right structure around him, but not when he went off to do things on his own.

God says you have to open up and trust Him and some other people first, and if you can get into those two relationships, that’s the meta-secret. Because from there you can find anything you need. But if you have a broken “trust muscle,” you’re like a baby who can’t take in the milk.

We tend to want to go for the results first. I tell my own story about how nothing worked until Matthew 6:33 hit me: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and then all these things will be added unto you.” Trust comes before the results, and we want the results first.

Just a brief reaction to this: among some Christian circles, psychology is very suspect. For Dr. Cloud to say there may be something of interest in The Secret is even more risky–in some circles. Note carefully what he has said though: not so much that the book has much by way of right answers, but that it has a good question: “Are there spiritual answers to how I can live a satisfying life?” Certainly much of the “secret” is pantheistic and wrong. There’s a kernel of truth, though, in its insistence that our thinking deeply affects our lives. Take that kernel to Scripture and you end up answering many people’s most urgently felt question.

Again, I strongly recommend Dr. Cloud to you, including this latest from him.

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith & New Age | 7 Comments »

They thought they had Jesus figured out, and they also thought they had him under control. Not so:

He [Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor] entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.” (John 19:9-11)

Pilate thought he had authority, and that only by his command would Jesus fate be determined. But the authority lay elsewhere. A few hours earlier Jesus had held back a follower who had tried to use force on his behalf:

Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” (Matthew 26:52-54)

The power lay not with Pilate, nor with the religious leaders or the crowd who pushed the governor to execute Jesus. The power lay with God, who had the whole circumstance planned out and prophesied long before.

There is yet another irony of which I was reminded at church this morning. It’s in Luke 24:13-34. Jesus, just risen from the dead, is talking with two people about the events of the weekend. They do not recognize him immediately in his resurrection body. So he asks them what’s been going on. They reply,

“Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” And he said to them, “What things?”

It reminds me of a story, probably true, of two English gentleman having a dispute over some topic. One of them suggested they settle it by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. The second one pulled it off the shelf, read the entry, and said, “Well, according to this, apparently you’re right.” And the first one said, “Yes, well, that’s what I thought I wrote there.”

Jesus must have been enjoying a similar kind of playful smile inside when he said, “What things?” They thought he was the one person who didn’t know what happened; he was the one who really did know! Read the rest of the story, though, and you’ll see that he didn’t move into gloating over his knowledge as our encyclopedia author. He taught them instead, in a way that connected deeply with their hearts.

The lesson again is not to try to outwit or outpower God. We are on his turf and meet him only on his terms–terms that are good and loving, for our life and freedom, and sometimes even with a sense of humor besides!

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith & Worshiping Christian | 2 Comments »

First posted on February 1, but made for Easter, for He is Risen!

Jesus Christ lived on Earth and displayed a life of perfect love, trust, and worship. His example is incomparably great–and it’s unreachable. Part of the validation of the message of Christ is in its unique combination of reality and perfection in the character He displayed. The standard He set is strongly desirable–if being a person who lives for the sake of God and others, and in great joy is attractive to you–and yet it is impossible.

The Example Was Not Enough
This takes us back to the predicament we all started in. God created us for relationship with Him, dependence on Him, and rich, full relationships with each other in an environment that didn’t constantly fight back. We haven’t lost the sense of how things ought to be, but we’ve certainly lost the experience of it. We’re told that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Sin is defined in the original context (and also in the original language) as a falling short, a failure to hit the mark.

In other words, if Jesus came just to teach and set an example, we might as well say, “A lot of good that did us! We can’t live up to that!”

But that’s not all he did. Again, going back to earlier in this series, recall that the penalty for rebelling against God was death. Jesus Christ lived to show us how to live, and then He died on the cross for us. We could speak of at least fifty reasons He suffered and died, as John Piper has done (skim the Table of Contents here), but most Christians put this one at the top of the list: he paid the death penalty on our behalf. Because He is God, and because He joined with us as a man Himself, he could do that on behalf of us all.

Rescue From Something Bigger Than We Are
The story is told of a drowning man, whom two men went to help. The first threw him a book on how to swim. The second pulled him out of the water. This is the difference between teaching and rescue. The analogy, like all others, is imperfect; this one understates the real value of teaching. But it does remind us that there are situations where teaching is not what we really need, and one of them is when we’re dying and cannot help ourselves. Most of the passengers on the Titanic were in that situation: even the best and strongest of them needed rescue. The water was too cold, the shore too far.

We can too easily fool ourselves about our need. Once I was chatting with a seatmate on an airplane. He said it was his first flight in over 10 years, but he was okay with that; he seemed quite at home and comfortable. I sensed he was the type who would feel quite at home and comfortable anywhere. Somehow we got to talking about Jesus Christ. He said, “I don’t need that. I’m in control of my life.” I said, “Well, I don’t see you flying this aircraft.” He responded, “Well, I could!”

I don’t know where my remark to him about flying the aircraft came from, but I do know that he had a vastly overrated sense of himself. A friend of mine who flew F-116s and A-10s for the Air Force said even he wouldn’t try to fly a commercial aircraft–not unless the flight attendant came back and said, “The cabin crew have both just had heart attacks, so could somebody please land the plane for us?” Then, he said, he might volunteer, but never otherwise. Every aircraft is different: too different to permit even a fighter pilot to think, “I can fly one, I can fly them all!”

So I told my over-confident seatmate that day, “I understand you don’t feel a need for this right now, and in that case I wouldn’t expect you to respond to what I’m saying about Christ. But I predict someday you’re going to run into something bigger than yourself. I urge you to keep this in the back of your mind until then.” I offered, and he accepted, a written summary of the message of Christ, similar to this.

We’re all going to run into something bigger than ourselves. (Some of us are looking it down the throat today.) The one most certain example is death. That’s why we need rescue and not just good teaching. Jesus’ death for us accomplished a rescue: not that we will never physically die, but that it will not be the end of the story.

A New Life
It certainly wasn’t the end of the story for Jesus! On the third day, He rose from the dead. He appeared first to several women, then to others of His followers, and on one occasion to more than 500 people at once. (Evidences for this abound, here, for example; though in this series my primary purpose has been to explain more than to prove. ) He defeated death for us! The rescue He accomplished was not just to pull us out of the water and into the ICU on life support, but to give us everlasting life with a full experience of love, joy, worship, and yes, also very significant challenge.

We need His example, but beyond that, we need His life in us.

By the way, that life is not just for someday in heaven. What Christ does for us also includes giving us a whole new quality of life on Earth.

Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us

• Part 1: Our Roots In God’s Plan
• Part 2: Broken Roots
• Part 3: The Extent of Brokenness
• Part 4: Restorations
• Part 5: Who Christ Is
• Part 6: Among Us, Loving Us
• Part 7: Showing How to Live
• Part 8: Death and Resurrection
• Part 9: The Cross, Again
• Part 10: The Resurrection, Again
• Part 11: Life in Christ

Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith | No Comments »