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“God’s love helps us receive and interpret our circumstances instead of having our hearts controlled by them. . . . And we don’t need to wonder whether God’s love for us is going to fade or fail; God’s love is just as steadfast as he is. As Jeremiah wrote, ‘The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.’ God’s love and mercy, the prophet tells us, are ‘new every morning.’”

— Matthew Westerholm, Evaluate Your Day Before It Begins

#Matthew Westerholm #Evaluate Your Day Before It Begins

“Through the teaching, support, sacrifice, worship, and commitment of the church, utterly ordinary people are enabled to do some rather extraordinary, even heroic acts, not on the basis of their own gifts or abilities, but rather by having a community capable of sustaining Christian virtue. The church enables us to be better people than we could have been if left to our own devices.

So our response to an issue like abortion is something communal, social, and political, but utterly ecclesial—something like baptism. Whenever a person is baptized, be that person a child or an adult, the church adopts that person. The new Christian is engrafted into a family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant fifteen-year-old, ‘Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.’ Rather, it is our problem. We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be. More important, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church, honestly to examine our own convictions and see whether or not we are living true to those convictions. She is seen by us not as some pressing social problem to be solved in such a way as to relieve our own responsibility for her and the necessity of our sacrificing on her behalf (for our story teaches us to seek such responsibility and sacrifice, not to avoid it through governmental aid). Rather, we are graciously given the eyes to see her as a gift of God sent to help ordinary people like us to discover the church as the Body of Christ.

[. . .] The most interesting, creative, political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to Congress, or increased funding for social programs—although we may find ourselves supporting such national efforts. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.

The Christian faith recognizes that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures who cannot reason or will our way out of our mortality. So the gospel begins, not with the assertion that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures, but with the pledge that, if we offer ourselves to a truthful story and the community formed by listening to and enacting that story in the church, we will be transformed into people more significant than we could ever have been on our own.

As [Karl] Barth says, ‘[The Church] exists . . . to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to [the world’s] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise’ (Church Dogmatics, 4.3.2).”

— Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, “All Christian Ethics Is a Social Ethic,” Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

#Stanley Hauerwas #William H. Willimon #William Willimon #All Christian Ethics Is a Social Ethic #Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony #Resident Aliens #Karl Barth #Barth #Church Dogmatics

Excerpt:

“God gives people the dignity of carrying the consequences of their bad decision. But that’s not the only way God responds to avon [the Hebrew word for ‘iniquity’] in the Bible; He also offers to carry the avon of corrupt people as an act of sheer generosity. In fact, carrying avon is the most common Hebrew phrase for God’s forgiveness, like Psalm 32, where the poet says, ‘I didn’t hide my avon but confessed it, and you [God] carried the avon of my sin.’ [v5]

This is actually shocking, if you stop and think about it. God forgives people by taking responsibility for their avon. This idea reaches its high point in the Book of Isaiah, where God appoints a figure called the Servant: he will embody God’s forgiving love by carrying the avon of many and allowing it to crush him. This Servant will absorb humanity’s crookedness, letting it overwhelm and destroy him. But that’s not the end of the story. The Servant will emerge out the other side of death, alive and well, so he can offer his life to others [Isaiah 53].

[. . .] Paul the Apostle identified the Servant as Jesus, and he said our great God and Savior, Jesus the Messiah, gave His life on our behalf in order to redeem us from all of our. . . crooked behavior and its consequences. And so, the whole biblical story is about God’s desire to take crooked people and the twisted world that we’ve created and to make everything right. Through Jesus, God invites us to become whole humans once again—people who can walk upright with God and with each other.”

#The Bible Project #Bible Project

“There are times when a thoughtful, loving, critical response is the most appropriate one. But before we jump in to offer it, we should examine our hearts and consider what is most beneficial, being willing to say nothing if it tears others down and hinders the Gospel of Christ. What we say matters. Choose carefully.”

— cmjoyner, The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

#cmjoyner #The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

“Unveiling flaws outside of ourselves requires little to no personal sacrifice. Examining the depths of our own brokenness requires vulnerability and risk, both of which are essential for growth.

Life in Jesus involves the death of self (Mark 8:34-35). This is difficult to do while clinging to the belief that we know more than someone else. But as we move into a space of grace, our eyes are opened to lessons we were blinded to before, and we begin to find the places in our hearts God longs to address. If we are too busy discussing the ways everyone else needs to change, we lose the ability to see our own need for restoration and we get stuck rather than grow.”

— cmjoyner, The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

#cmjoyner #The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

“Identifying problems is easy. Following [the Apostle] Paul’s call [in his letter to the Philippians] to focus on what is good, lovely and admirable takes intentional work, and it breathes new life into our relationships. If God can choose to no longer look on our sin, we can choose to stop focusing on the things we would change in others and get busy loving them instead.”

— cmjoyner, The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

#cmjoyner #The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

“[The Church] is made up of broken people. We may not agree with everything, in fact, we may be spot on in calling out behavior that opposes the Gospel, but let’s speak truth with the love and humility of Jesus. He died for this Bride that He adores, so I’d imagine how we talk about her matters to Him.”

— cmjoyner, The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

#cmjoyner #The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches

It was an attitude I learned in Church, and I used to believe it was a strength. I thought I was simply a critical thinker, full of constructive insights. My

Excerpt:

“[C]ynicism doesn’t always present itself in the sweeping, broad negativity we see on TV. In the day-to-day, it looks more like quick, unwarranted, 'constructive' criticism. I’m not talking about the critical thinking required for success as an adult. I’m referring to the way we constantly evaluate and critique people and what they do. [. . .]

Subtle cynicism, or the overly critical nature of our culture, is a toxin satan uses against the Church. And it’s all the more damaging because we often don’t even realize it’s happening. [. . . W]hen we recognize the dangers of subtle cynicism, we are able to engage in honest conversations that are productive, loving and full of grace. [. . .]

There are times when a thoughtful, loving, critical response is the most appropriate one. But before we jump in to offer it, we should examine our hearts and consider what is most beneficial, being willing to say nothing if it tears others down and hinders the Gospel of Christ. What we say matters. Choose carefully.”

#The Most Damaging Attitude in Our Churches #cmjoyner

You do not lack self-discipline because you lack willpower. Your willpower has simply conquered your desires for God.

Excerpt:

“Our will always obeys our wants — our real wants, not our fantasy wants. And our real wants are based on our real beliefs, not our fantasy beliefs.

So, when we can’t sustain some new self-discipline regimen, it’s very likely that our resolve was based on a fantasy reward. What typically happens is we imagine what experiencing the benefits of attaining some goal might feel like — perhaps a fit body, or reading the Bible in a year, or some kind of career advancement, or the fruit of more intercessory prayer, or a financial savings goal, or a new boldness in evangelism. What we imagine appears desirable to us. We feel a burst of inspiration, so we make a resolve. We think (or want to think) our inspiration stems from a new conviction that the reward we imagine will make us happy.

But once we experience the unpleasantness of self-denial, the inspiration evaporates and the goal no longer seems worth it, so we give it up. What happened? We liked the imagination of the reward, but the reward itself wasn’t real enough to fuel our discipline — we didn’t really believe in it. It was a fantasy. And when the fantasy was dispelled, we realized we wanted another reward more and our will followed.

It wasn’t a lack of will power; it was a lack of reward power. [. . .]

That is the key to self-discipline: our real belief that the pleasures of a reward will be worth the denial of lesser pleasures. And that’s what nourishes the spiritual fruit of self-control in our lives (Galatians 5:23): wanting the rewards the Spirit offers us more than the rewards sin or the world offer us.

This is really good news to self-discipline stumblers like us! If we’re not pursuing the kingdom of God first (Matthew 6:33), if the surpassing worth of knowing Christ isn’t causing us to count all else as rubbish (Philippians 3:8), the Spirit’s remedy to our problem is not more white-knuckled, duty-motivated efforts to be more disciplined. Rather, the Spirit is inviting us into greater delight. He wants us to explore and examine the imperishable reward God longs to give us with all his heart and soul — to plead that the eyes of our heart will be enlightened to see it (Ephesians 1:17) — knowing that the more we seek to see, the more he’ll reveal and help us believe. And the more that happens, the more we’ll view self-discipline, not as a drudgery to be avoided, but as a means to the joy we really want.”

#The Secret to Self-Discipline #Jon Bloom

“Don’t miss this: Jacob encountered God and left with a limp. Those special times and seasons of struggle (brokenness episodes) leave us—dare I say it—wonderfully scarred. We are marked by God. And our ‘limp’ is a reminder that we are human, frail, and weak. But it is also a monument to the grace, mercy, and power of God. Our ‘limp’ is a trophy. It says that God carried us. It says that He is all that we need. He is our source, our strength, our everything.”

— Crawford Loritts, “Seasons of Brokenness,” Leadership as an Identity: The Four Traits of Those Who Wield Lasting Influence

#Crawford Loritts #Leadership as an Identity #Leadership as an Identity: The Four Traits of Those Who Wield Lasting Influence

“[God’s] the only One who has the right to run my life, and yet, He’s the most gracious, loving Father. He has the right and I have the privilege of surrender.”