It was a great privilege this morning at Coram Deo to have JD and Michele Senkbile back with us. The Senkbiles were an integral part of the original team that founded Coram Deo. They moved to Cape Town, South Africa, in December of 2008 to oversee Acts 29′s church planting work on the African continent. Throughout 2009, the Holy Spirit made it clear that they needed to plant a church in Cape Town as a home base for gospel movement in southern Africa. So in January of 2010, they launched Vox City Church in the heart of Cape Town. The word vox is Latin for voice… Vox City Church desires to be a voice for the gospel in the heart of Cape Town.
If you’re not familiar with JD and the work God has called him to, audio from today’s message will be up shortly on the Resources page or Coram Deo’s iTunes podcast. Keep JD and Michele and their team in your prayers as they seek to shape a biblically faithful, culturally relevant gospel-community-on-mission in this important global city.
One of my favorite spiritual writers is A.W. Tozer. He begins his master work The Knowledge of the Holy with a chapter entitled “Why We Must Think Rightly About God.” I used the following quote in a Bible study on biblical eldership this weekend to emphasize the importance of sound theology, and thought I’d post it here for the benefit of other readers as well.
(If you’ve never read The Knowledge of the Holy, consider this your invitation to pick up a copy. It’s well worth your time and effort.)
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.
For this reason the gravest question before the church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the church… Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on his character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is – in itself a monstrous sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness…
Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilized peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place… Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.
Before the Christian church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, “What is God like?” and goes on from there… The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.
Every summer, Acts 29 lead pastors and their wives from across the country gather in Colorado for 3 days of rest, refreshment, and reconnecting. At these retreats we dive in deeply with each other and often hear “off the record” from some of the key leaders and influencers within the Acts 29 movement. Here are the five best quotes from the teaching time at this year’s retreat:
“How many of you guys are in your 20′s? [Pause to let audience raise hands] You don’t know ANYTHING!” – Mark Driscoll
“Why don’t you stop blogging about election and go find some elect people?” – Mark Driscoll, lambasting Calvinists who love doctrine but don’t share the gospel with anyone
“Don’t come up in here talking about yo’ Reformed theology if God ain’t sovereign from your waist down!” – Eric Mason, talking about young black men in his church committing sexual immorality
“My elders be flankin’ me… if you want to step to a girl in my church, you gotta come through a FLEET of dudes!” – Mason, talking about protecting his flock from irresponsible young men
“God, I know you sometimes take your people home early… I’m just praying you wouldn’t do that with my daddy.” - Matt Chandler describing his 7-year-old daughter’s prayer for him at bedtime one night
Last month the women of Coram Deo (along with guests from many other churches around Omaha) welcomed author and filmmaker Carolyn McCulley for the Radical Womanhood Conference. The audio from Carolyn’s sessions is now uploaded and available either on the Resources page or on the Coram Deo podcast.
If you weren’t there, you can catch up on the content you missed. Or, if you attended, you can revisit the material that most interested you.
from the “Gospel and the Heart” study, Harbor Presbyterian Church, San Diego CA
The liberal/pragmatist approach to evangelism is to deny the legitimacy of evangelism altogether. By contrast, the conservative/moralist person does believe in proselytizing, because “we are right and they are wrong.” Such proselytizing is almost always offensive.
The gospel is a “third way,” different from both of these, which produces a constellation of traits in us:
First, we are compelled to share the gospel out of generosity and love, not guilt
Second, we are freed from fear of being ridiculed or hurt by others, since we already have the favor of God by grace
Third, there is a humility in our dealings with others, because we know we are saved only by grace alone, not because of our superior insight or character.
Fourth, we are hopeful about anyone, even the “hard cases,” because we were saved only because of grace, not because we were likely people to be Christians.
Fifth, we are courteous and careful with people. We don’t have to push or coerce them, for it is only God’s grace that opens hearts, not our eloquence or persistence or even their openness.
All these traits not only create a winsome evangelist but an excellent neighbor in a multi-cultural society.
Several weeks ago I was in a bookstore, where I noticed a boy of 10 or 12 thumbing through the most recent Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. His mother stood nearby, her boy and his newfound reading material in full sight. She seemed not to care. It’s a sign of something—decayed community bonds, perhaps, or moral cowardice—that the thought of speaking to her about this made me cringe. Then the boy put down the magazine, and they wandered to another part of the bookstore, and that was that.
Of course that wasn’t really that, because the entire purpose of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and indeed of most pornography choking the stream of popular culture—be it sexual or violent—is to cast images that are unforgettable. Whether it’s a woman arching luridly, or a film villain carving up his screaming victims, their creators and especially their profit-seeking marketers want you to remember what you’ve witnessed.
And boys do remember. I remember discovering my stepfather’s stash of pornography as a child, and the heart-thumping realization that here was something secret and forbidden. There’s no regaining your innocence once you’ve looked upon obscenity. That’s one reason for obscenity laws, not so much that we might transform the onanist or pornographer, but because once a child sees the vulgar T-shirt or cast-aside magazine, he is forever changed.
The sophisticated will snicker. What’s wrong with a boy looking at women in bathing suits, after all? It’s hardly hardcore pornography, after all. And besides, boys will be boys.
Boys will indeed be boys, but there are a great many varieties of boys, and of men. The person who pretends that seeing women as items of sexual consumption doesn’t shape a man’s behavior is, in fact, the one who is being simple-minded, for all his feigned urbanity.
But we don’t want to talk that way, because it smacks of puritanism, and besides, these lovely women are just proud of their bodies, as are their families. This year’s SI cover girl, semi-topless Brooklyn Decker, reports that her mother cried when she made the cover. Out of pride. Her husband, tennis player Andy Roddick, tweeted his pride as well.
I once saw a talk show on which a porn actress insisted that she wasn’t cheating on her husband because the sex she performed for paychecks was “different.” This personalized truth is inevitable in a world more inclined to follow Pilate (“What is truth?”) than Christ (“Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice”).
It’s distortion that’s essential to the self-esteem of people inclined toward pornography but not yet liberated enough to call it such. Thus are the nearly naked women in Sports Illustrated, or the college girls who pose in Playboy’s periodic college campus issues, simply proud of their bodies. How dare anyone deprive these women of their self-esteem by telling them that, in blunt terms, they’re simply taking off their clothes for money and applause?
One might be tempted to think the damage is limited to the girl who exposes herself for cash, the boy learning to look at women the way a butcher eyes a cut of meat. But the damage is never limited. The compromised woman has taught countless girls that this is how to gain the admiration of men. The boy, meanwhile, has been weakened, and the seeds of a hunger have been sown, and he has started down a path toward the perversion of a man’s natural desire for women.
The libertine scoffs, but I know too many men for whom this is true. I am one of those men. Images are etched into my mind, and they spark a perpetual struggle. Many of my sins, especially those against my wife, are rooted in those illicit hours learning to see women as playthings.
The eyes and ears of children must be guarded—this is common wisdom garnered over centuries and across civilizations. Only recently has it been cast aside. “Guard your son” is what I should have told the mother in the bookstore. “It doesn’t end with this,” I should have said. God help me, I know.
Erick Whigham has been serving as a volunteer intern with us at Coram Deo this spring. He and his wife moved here from South Dakota to be part of a missional church and to finish some master’s degree work. Erick has been trying to get a job to help transition his family to the next phase and put down some roots in Omaha. We told him that when he got a job, we would all wear power ties in honor of him. He got a job. So today was Power Tie Tuesday.
And I must say, we got a heck of a lot done today. Must be something about the professional attire.
The point of the Redemption Stories video series is to narrate how the gospel is changing the lives of actual people within the Coram Deo Church Community. Randi’s is one of my favorite stories yet: a great tale of God’s providence with an interesting back-story involving a sermon I preached in the Douglas County Jail. (To one of the most intimidating audiences I’ve ever faced… and they were all women).
Thanks, Randi, for sharing your story on video. And thank you Jesus for your amazing grace that transforms felons into followers and friends.
