Category: Quotes

Proper Christian Growth

On By Dr. Casey LewisIn Leadership, Pastoral, Quotes2 Comments

It is all too easy for us to think that once we know the basics of the gospel we must then move beyond them for true spiritual growth. Yet it is not extra-biblical revelations and methods that mature us, nor is it the search for esoteric meanings and codes in Scripture. Instead, it is the continual attempt to plumb the depths of the gospel message and its application to all of life, which is, in fact, the story of the Bible.

Question for Reflection

  1. How do you pursue Christian growth

Resources

Table Talk Magazine, Proper Christian Growth, January 6 2011.

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Do We Attract Like Jesus?

On By Dr. Casey LewisIn Practical, Quotes3 Comments

Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day.

The Church Today

However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to the contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church.

What Does This Mean?

That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.

Question for Reflection

  1. Have you known this to be true in your own life – our message differing from Jesus’ in either word or deed?

Resources

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Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God: Recovering the heart of the Christian faith, 15-16 via A Meal with Jesus by Tim Chester, 84.

Missional Contextualization for Gospel Transformation

On By Dr. Casey LewisIn Discipleship, Evangelism, Practical, Quotes1 Comment

Paul’s determination to adapt himself to the different cultures and contexts in which he would work established a basic mission strategy reflective of an important understanding of the relationship between the gospel and culture that has been essential to effective mission work throughout history.

What Could Have Been the Strategy

The Christian church could have simply decided that the gospel was a Jewish message sent throughout the world and that a proper response to the gospel should result in adopting the same cultural incarnation in all places. In that way Christians would all look and act the same, all have the same culture, wherever (or whenever) they lived.

What is the Strategy

Paul understands that the gospel does not belong to any particular culture.

As the gospel takes root among different peoples and cultures, its essence will remain the same but its “look and feel” may be somewhat different.

Why Contextualization is Important

Paul’s ability to adapt his life and culture according to the context in which he worked would have been strategic not only for the initial communication of the gospel but also for the ability of his converts to understand what it would look like for them to become members of Christ’s body. Gentile converts would not have to adopt Jewish culture to be members of Christ’s community, and Jewish converts to Christ would not need to become Gentiles or reject their Jewish heritage and lifestyle as part of their recognition of Christ’s lordship.

Question for Reflection

  1. Do you expect the lost to adapt to your culture? If so, why could that be an unnecessary hindrance to salvation?

Resources

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Text from Ciampa and Rosner, 1 Corinthians (PNTC), 425-26. Headings are my own.

A Continual Reformation

On By Dr. Casey LewisIn Devotionals, QuotesLeave a comment

Fundamentally, Reformed theology is theology founded on and fashioned by God’s Word.

For it is God’s Word that forms our theology, and it is we who are reformed by that theology as we constantly return to God’s Word every day and in every generation.

At its core, this is what the sixteenth-century Reformation was all about, and it’s what being Reformed is all about – confessing and practicing what God’s Word teaches.

The Reformation isn’t over, nor will it ever be over, because reformation – God’s word and God’s Spirit reforming His church – will never end.

God’s Word is always powerful and God’s Spirit is always working to renew our minds, transform our hearts, and change our lives. Therefore, the people of God, the church, will be always “being reformed” according to the unchanging Word of God, not according to our ever-changing culture.

Question for Reflection

  1. Is God’s Word or the culture changing you?

Resources

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TableTalk Magazine, January 2015, The True Reformers, Burk Parsons

The Reformer’s Cry

On By Dr. Casey LewisIn Devotionals, QuotesLeave a comment

Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, secundum verbum Dei – The church reformed and always being reformed according to God’s Word.

Question for Reflection

  1. Do you realize God’s Word and Spirit are always reforming His church by renewing, transforming, and changing us?

Resources

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On Christian Liberty

On By Dr. Casey LewisIn Devotionals, QuotesLeave a comment

The end or purpose of Christian liberty is not to smoke or drink; liberty is given for the pursuit of holiness. Those who wave the banner of Christian liberty so that they might do whatever they might want to do have not understood the doctrine at all.

To Learn Holiness

Christian liberty is given so that we might learn to be holy.

“That he would grant not us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life” (Lk. 1:74-75)

To be a Slave to Righteousness

Paul teaches in Romans 6:18-23 that freedom from sin necessarily entails slavery to righteousness (v. 18). If we are not serving God as slaves, bearing fruit to holiness (v. 22), then this means we do not comprehend the point of Christian liberty.

There are really only two alternatives – if we are not growing in grace and true personal holiness then anything we do is an act of slavery – not liberty. Rather we are slaves to sin, and it does not matter if as “slaves to sin” we smoke a cigar or not, or drink beer or not. In other words, we must never think that a class of “behaviors” opens to anyone apart from personal holiness. There is no middle territory between the two.

Christian liberty is nothing other than slavery to God.

To Do All We Do Before the Lord in Holiness

[Which is why] [t]he point is not to drink or smoke or dance according to our own whims, in the light of our own wisdom, but to do whatever we do before the Lord, with the increase of joy and holiness obvious to all.

Question for Reflection

  1. Do you abuse what many refer to as Christian liberty, or do you see it as an opportunity to be a slave to God and a way to grow in holiness?

Resources

Douglas Wilson, Future Men, 77; 80

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