Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Part VII: Remember That The Goal Is Kingdom, Not Heaven And Resurrection Of The Body, Not Immortality Of The Soul

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Pastor Foley

I really want to recommend Russell Moore’s book, The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective. Moore is the Dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he uses a scholarly hammer to drive home the key messages that we’ve been sharing this month about making sure we are proclaiming the kingdom of God, just as it is proclaimed in the Scriptures and by the early church fathers and by the Reformers and wherever and whenever the church has been faithful. He’s the guy who said that the goal is the kingdom and the bodily resurrection, not heaven and the immortality of the soul.

He’d be a great guy to explain why the best way to proclaim the gospel is not to say,  “If you died tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity?”

Moore explains that “personal salvation cannot be understood apart from the unique role of humanity in the Kingdom purposes of God” (Moore, 99). God created humans not simply to have a personal relationship with them. He created them to reign over creation by mirroring his life and goodness into it. So when Jesus achieves his victory, he does not cry out, “Now we can have a personal relationship!” There is that, of course. But he comes to reclaim humanity’s role and responsibility to reign over God’s creation as “viceregents” (Moore, 99). Here’s how Moore puts it:

Salvation is seen, holistically, in terms of a bodily resurrection, the reversal of the Edenic curse, and the restoration of humanity as viceregents of the created order. The work of the Spirit in regenerating the heart is not therefore seen as a purely “spiritual” matter. Instead, it is the uniting of the individual to the pioneer of salvation (Heb. 2:10), the One who is “justified” by God, has merited resurrection from the dead, and who therefore can claim the cosmos as His inheritance (Ps. 2:1-12; 45:6-17; Acts 2:22-36; 1 Cor. 15:21-28; Heb. 1:2; Rev. 1:4-6). Resurrection is seen as central to God’s redemptive purposes because it is central to God’s Kingdom purposes. Salvation is pictured, not in terms of escape from the world, but as restoring the human person’s right to rule over the world (Matt. 19:28; Rev. 3:21) (Moore, 111).

So when we are saved, we get to have a personal relationship with God…but not a private one. We are joint heirs being trained to reign with him over all creation. That’s big—bigger than going to heaven when you die—and we need to proclaim it as such.

When we do, it helps people to quickly see that they are going to need a lot of help in this process—something muuuuuuuch greater than “a free gift at the book table in the back to help you get started in your Christian life.” As Moore notes, “The New Testament never severs personal regeneration from membership in the church” (Moore, 148).

And just in case we missed it, Moore adds, “The New Testament does not present the sacrificial, substitutionary atonement as directed toward isolated individuals. Instead, the atonement is directed in the New Testament toward the gathering of a church” (Acts 20:28; Eph. 5:22-23) (Moore, 153).

If we proclaim the Gospel and say that the outcome is that we go to heaven when we die, wow, have we missed the mark of Scripture! The message of Scripture is that through faith—which brings along with it repentance and confession and, yep, even good works, none of which saves and all of which are means of grace by which we come to know God more deeply—God places us in a new family that points to a new creation that will be fully revealed soon.

Craig Blaising at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Darrell Bock at Dallas Theological Seminary describe the church as a “workshop of Kingdom righteousness” (Moore, 142). I like that. When we’re saved, we’re saved into the church and into the kingdom, not out of the world and on to heaven. And we live this life of daily confession and repentance and practicing the Works of Mercy and the Works of Piety—all grace, all gifts that he gives to those he loves to grow us into the fullness of Christ, the greatest gift of all.

Bock says that as we live this new creation life, if we’re faithful and we’re letting God pour his life and power and grace through us, we ought to be able to say to others, “If you want to see God and the promise of his powerful, transforming rule, look at what he is doing among us” (Moore, 142).

That may be the most natural—and supernatural–proclamation of all.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Part VI: Make Sure BOTH Confessions Are Very, Very Specific

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Paul says in Romans 10:9-11, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved” (Rom. 10:9-11).

Notice how specific that confession is. It’s not a confession when someone says, “I believe in God and stuff.” As Polycarp noted shortly before he was martyred, “To confess Christ with the heart is to acknowledge him as he is, as Lord… Confessing requires…articulating in words and sentences to fellow human beings penitent words fitting to the occasion” (Oden, 581).

And note how public that confession is. It’s not a one-time prayer at an evangelism rally. It’s a daily confession before the world. As Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:12, “If we deny him, he also will deny us.” So really, when it comes to confession, the whole sentence could properly be interpreted, “If you confess with your mouth and do not deny that confession…”

But there’s another part of the concept of confession we need to not miss that’s equally important. Confession is used in two ways in the Scripture:  in relation to confessing Christ as Lord, and in relation to confessing sin. And it turns out the two are joined at the hip. As Clement of Rome pointed out, “One who has not confessed sin is hardly prepared to confess Christ” (Oden, 579).

And what the Scripture has in mind is not a general confession like, “Sure, I’m a sinner. After all, we all sin, right? Nobody’s perfect.” That is not a confession of sin. It’s just a vague but true statement. As Oden notes, “To be genuine, confession must be sincere, personal, definite, and unconditional, not ambivalent or blurred or halting…” The Protestant Reformers put it this way in the Westminster Confession: “Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance” (Westminster Conf., 15) (Oden, 580).

As you evangelize, teach confession as a lifestyle, not an event. It’s not a rusty turnstile that you walk through one time and scratch yourself on the way to becoming a Christian. It’s a way of life—a constant, searching self-examination in the company of other brothers and sisters to make sure we are not deceived by Satan, who is so good at blinding us to our sin.

And did you catch that I said, “In the company of other brothers and sisters?” As we’ll note in our next and final post in this series, we desperately need to reform our proclamation in order to make clear that the outcome of our believing the gospel is not just a personal relationship with God but a whole new life in a whole new family in a whole new creation.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Part V: Prescribe Repentance When Someone Responds to the Gospel

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Pastor Foley

It’s interesting that in Luke 15:10, Jesus says that it is in the repentance of one sinner that heaven rejoices. He doesn’t say the belief of one sinner prompts rejoicing, not because repentance is more important or necessary than belief, but because as Paul notes in 2 Corinthians 7:10, “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation.” Or, to put it differently, properly understood, repentance and belief both appear in seed form in the same seed.

And by repentance we mean something more than feeling sorry for how messed up things are. As Thomas Oden says, “Though the English word repentance carries the nuance of sorrow for what one has done, it does not as adequately imply reformation of character as does the Greek. Hence it is a less powerful term than metanoia [the Greek word for “repentance”], which implies a fundamental behavioral reversal (Matt. 3:8; Acts 26:20; Heb. 6:1,6). Metanoia denotes a sweeping change of mind and heart followed by a behavioral reformation of a sinful life, a sorrowing for sin so as to forsake sin altogether” (Oden, 567). It would be a mistake to ask if repentance is “necessary” for salvation like faith is. It would be better to ask: What in the world would authentic faith look like if it didn’t come accompanied by genuine repentance?

One way of thinking about it is that repentance is how God involves our whole self in the process of new birth. Our spirit is enlivened. Even our bodies get into the act in baptism. And when it comes to repentance, every part of our soul—mind, will, and emotion—will be involved if the repentance is really prompted by the Holy Spirit. Oden puts it this way:

The reversal does not occur without first a change of mind, a revised conception of oneself, utilizing one’s own best moral reasoning to recognize the intolerable cost of sin. But where the reversal touches only the mind but not the heart and will, the despair of sin deepens.

Repentance requires a change of heart, a deep sorrowing for sin, aware that sin, whether personal or social, is in fact sin against God who gives humans freedom (Ps. 51:4). Far more than a mode of analytical reasoning, repentance is a deeply felt remorse and emotively experienced regret over wrongs done voluntarily against others, offending one’s own integrity and dignity and finally offending God.

Repentance requires a change of will, a redirected disposition to seek a new life of forgiveness and grateful responsibility. This reversal is not fully accounted for as an act of knowing or feeling. It is a grace-enabled act of volition, a determination to turn the whole self around (Oden, 568).

That’s why the typical “admit that you’re a sinner” doesn’t get at the fullness of what the Scripture is talking about. Oden calls repentance “a radical act of self-examination reaching into every chamber of the house of willed experience” (Oden, 572). The Holy Spirit is working in your brain, your will, and your emotions—and that typically takes some time. That’s why in the early church they didn’t have a habit of rushing people into the Christian life after a quick prayer, no matter how deep and sincere they seemed. Sin can deceive you for a long time, even when you’ve resolved to follow Christ. That year of preparation and searching self-examination under the guidance of mature Christian brothers and sisters was a crucial part of making it so when, as part of their public baptism, they confessed Christ and renounced sin, they were striking at the root of evil in their lives, not “trimming leaves one at a time” (Oden, 575).

Oh—and speaking of confession, we need to note a very important truth about that in our next post: If we want to reform our proclamation of the gospel, we need to remember that Christians are only ever as strong as their two-pronged confession.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment