How is that for an attention grabbing title?  Recently, I have been reading John Stott’s seminal work, The Cross of Christ and I hit this section that just really leapt off the page at me.  The context is Stott talking about the first century Jewish people and their priests and how they reacted and responded to Jesus’ ministry:

“So they felt threatened by Jesus.  He undermined their prestige, their hold over the people, their own self-confidence and self-respect, while leaving his intact.  They were “envious” of him, and therefore determined to get rid of him.  It is significant that Matthew recounts two jealous plots to eliminate Jesus, the first by Herod the Great at the beginning of his life and the other by the priests at its end.  Both felt their authority under threat.  So both sought to “destroy” Jesus (Mt 2:13; 27:20 AV). However outwardly respectable the priests’ political and theological arguments may have appeared, it was envy which led them to “hand over” Jesus to Pilate to be destroyed (Mk 15:1, 10).

The same evil passion influences our own contemporary attitudes to Jesus.  He is still, as C. S. Lewis called him, “a transcendental interferer.” We resent his intrusions into our privacy, his demand for our homage, his expectation of our obedience. Why can’t he mind his own business, we ask petulantly, and leave us alone? To which he instantly replies that we are his business and that he will never leave us alone. So we too perceive him as a threatening rival who disturbs our peace, upsets our status quo, undermines our authority and diminishes our self-respect. We too want to get rid of him.”

–John Stott, The Cross of Christ. p58

My wife has posted some thoughts on putting our house on the market.  Check them out on our family blog.

As of last night our house is officially on the market. This is a huge step in our journey to Lincoln. We now enter free fall and trust in the perfect timing and provision of God. If you think of it please pray for our sanity, stress, and anxiety. Pray that we would rest in the confidence of what God has called us to. And if you happen to know anyone in the St. Louis area looking for a house, please feel free to point them to the listing.

I am a stats guy.  I love them.  I eat them up.  Recently I came across a study done by some researchers out at Rutgers University on the usage of Twitter.  You can read the whole thing over at Mashable, but just to give you a taste, here are some summarizing graphs (because I also love graphs) and other stats.  The table below helps you interpret the graph:

• Informers have a higher proportion of mentions of other users in their messages (that is they @reply to more Twitterers)
• 25% of messages come from mobile phones
• 51% of mobile-posted messages are “me now” messages, compared to the
• 37% of “me now” messages posted from non-mobile applications

Do you use Twitter?  How do you use Twitter?  Why do you use Twitter?

(HT: Mashable)

Here’s another one of those fascinating fact-filled videos on the emergence of new forms of media and communication.  Watch and be amazed.

After God gave the promise to Abraham, he gave the law to Moses. Why? He had  to make things worse before He could make them better. The law exposed sin, provoked sin, condemned sin. The purpose of the law was to lift the lid off man’s respectability and disclose what he is really underneath — sinful, rebellious, guilty, under the judgment of God and helpless to save himself.

And the law must still be allowed to do its God-given duty today. One of the great faults of the contemporary church is the tendency to soft-pedal sin and judgment… We must never bypass the law and come straight to the gospel. To do so is to contradict the plan of God in biblical history… No man has ever appreciated the gospel until the law has first revealed him to himself. It is only against the inky blackness of the night sky that the stars begin to appear, and it is only against the dark background of sin and judgment that the gospel shines forth.”

–John Stott, Galatians, pp. 92-93.

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Inc and social media extraordinaire has a helpful and insightful post on Re-Thinking My Facebook Strategy.  I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking through social media strategy in general and found this helpful.  Of course, it’s probably most helpful if you’ve got more Facebook “friends” than you can handle (not really true for me…I’m just not that cool).  Hyatt does a great job of breaking down and defining who is a friend and who isn’t and how to approach Facebook from that understanding.

I am a seminary student.  What that means is that I do not have everything figured out.  In fact, I am a human so the reality is that I never will have everything figured out.  I am okay with that, but I don’t always like it.  I experienced this first hand recently when struck with a new doctrine that I had never heard of as part of a recent seminary course I took.  The doctrine? Union with Christ.

John Murray starts the ninth chapter of his book, Redemption: Accomplished and Applied with some bold and broad statements.  In the opening paragraph he states that without union with Christ, “our view of the Christian life would be gravely distorted.”  Further, Murray states that, “Nothing is more central or basic than union and communion with Christ.”  Still on the first page, he notes that it is a very broad and embrasive subject and that it “underlies every step of the application of redemption” as well as being “the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation not only as its application but also in its once for all accomplishment in the finished work of Christ.”  These are bold and broad claims.  To someone who calls themself a Christian, but has never even heard of this thing called ‘union with Christ,’ they can be offensive and even deterring and thus create resistance in the reader.

“In Christ” – what does that mean?  How many times have I read a passage of Scripture and been confused or simply unclear of exactly what that meant? 164 times in the letters of Paul alone according to John Stott.

Drawing from passages like Romans 6:4, Murray shows that the Christian life is lived by virtue of our union with Christ.  Not only that, but that we also remain “united with Christ” in our death (1 Thess. 4:14, 16).  And finally that “in Christ” we will also be made alive again when the last trumpet sounds (1 Cor. 15:22).

When I’m honest with myself, I am resistant to some of the bold and exhaustive claims that Murray makes in the opening of this chapter in Redemption: Accomplished and Applied.  As I’ve prayed, read Scripture, and reflected however, I’ve begun to see that the root of my resistance has been – in some way – pride.  Pride in the fact that I call myself a Christian and that “I’ve never heard of this union with Christ thing before.”  I’d heard of sanctification and had a quasi-Lutheran based view of it as a process in which God was at work in me do make me more like Jesus.  However, my understanding of sanctification was fuzzy at best.  I knew that my sanctification wasn’t based on my works but that really just left me clueless to how it actually progressed.  I knew it was by the work of the Holy Spirit, but I did not cleanly grasp the concept of being purely adopted and given a new heart at my justification.  Wrestling with all of this has taken me from a focus of ‘Who God is and what He’s done’ and expanded upon that to add ‘Who I am as a Christian because of it all.’  I’m a child of God.  I have been blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose me in him before the foundation of the world…(Ephesians 1:3-4).  For most of my Christian walk I have focused on “redemption accomplished” at the neglect of “redemption applied.”

In wrestling with the doctrine of union with Christ for the last four weeks I have found extreme confidence in my assured and secured salvation by growing in my understanding of this doctrine.  And not just my confidence in eternal salvation, but also in grasping God’s love for me from eternity past to eternity future.  It puts God’s unconditional election despite my depravity in a whole new light.  It puts his irresistible grace despite my sinful nature in a whole new light.  These words of Murray really struck me in this regard, “Apart from union with Christ we cannot view past, present, or future with anything but dismay and Christless dread. By union with Christ the whole complexion of time and eternity is changed and the people of God may rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”

I feel a little like I’ve opened up the doors of a wardrobe to find a whole new world existing that I never even knew was there.  If you’ve never heard of this concept of ‘union with Christ,’ pick up a copy of Murray’s book and go wrestling.  My prayer for you is that Murray will win.

Is social media a fad or is it a fundamental shift in how we communicate? I vote for the latter.

I recently picked up and devoured Tim Keller’s little book titled The Prodigal God: Rediscovering the Heart of the Christian Faith.  What I found was one of the most concise, succinct, and engaging depictions of the gospel that I’ve ever encountered.

Working from the Parable of the Two Sons (which he uniquely twists into his title of the prodigal God), Keller unpacks the gospel while hitting you smack in the face with your own self-righteousness.  If you’re new to Christianity, if you’re stale in Christianity, or if you’re simply wrestling with trying to know God better, give this book a read.  Below is a quote from the book which I highly commend.

“Through this parable Jesus challenges what nearly everyone has ever thought about God, sin, and salvation. His story reveals the destructive self-centeredness of the younger brother, but is also condemns the elder brother’s moralistic life in the strongest terms.  Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and the religious are spiritually lost, both life-paths are dead ends, and that every thought the human race has had about how to connect to God has been wrong.”