Glorious Mud

I want to invite you to make a plan for reading the Bible, but first I want to tell you a story. After I graduated from high school, I moved from California to Iowa to attend a small Bible College.  I wasn't a believer, but I chose to go anyway because Dubuque, Iowa was as far as I could go away from home and still have my mom pay for it. What a crazy year - I went from beaches to corn fields and pigs, from the 80's punk-skater subculture to the 80's Christian subculture, from never opening a Bible to being immersed in intense theological study and discussions and even the study of Koine Greek.  I had no idea what I was getting into. I hated high school - and most things about my life in San Diego at that point - and I thought an escape was in order.  I had no plan to actually believe this stuff.  But while it wasn't part of my plan, I became a believer that year (thankfully, it was part of my Father's plan!).  It was a strange thing - the more...

I gave a message at the Journey Metro East a couple months ago about men, women, and dating. I spoke from 1 Peter 3 and sought to reverse engineer what the Bible has to say about successful marriages and apply it to dating (since the Bible is completely silent on the issue of dating). I try to prepare every message with God's help (and if it weren't for him, I would have nothing of worth to offer - ever), but even so God doesn't tell me the topics to preach on very often. That said, this was one of those sermons that I had to preach. I wasn't planning to - I had a great sermon on what it meant to be the covenant people of God ready to go - it was already outlined and submitted to the Journey teaching team for pre-preaching discussion. I was pretty happy with myself - for once, I was ahead of the game. Then one morning, about a week before delivering that sermon, I woke up in a fog having a conversation with myself. The words followed me up out of mists of slumberland...

Each of the Journey campuses has started teaching a gospel class - a class that answers basic questions about following Christ and being a member in our church. This class has attracted a large number of people who are "peaking over the fence" - checking this whole Christianity thing out. That is both exciting and challenging. It gives us the chance to share the Bible with people who don't necessarily come to it with faith - as well as challenge those who do trust the Bible to get on mission with us. Our first lesson was on the story arc of the Bible - what is referred to as the diachronic view of scripture. Simply put, it is a way of looking at scripture as a complete story - with one major primary theme: God in Jesus reconciling the world to himself. Teaching a diachronic view of scripture to postmodern culture, though, presents some unique challenges. In prepping to teach, I wrote out the following thoughts. I would be glad to get any thoughts you have on this to...

A good friend sent me a link a blog post by Tullian Tchividjian about the importance of a tri-perspectival approach to preaching (you can read the original post here ). Essentially, he is arguing that those of us who preach the Word are obligated to not simply exegete the text, but our culture and ourselves at the same time. The goal isn't simply to bring out the meaning of the text, but to expose the cultural idols as well as the idols of our heart. I fully agree with him. But this made me reflect a bit on my own journey in preaching. After I became a follower of Christ, I landed in a small Plymouth Brethren (PB) assembly where I discovered my gifts and started teaching in the church. The PB have a number of strengths as a movement - one of which is their emphasis on exegetical teaching. I was on a teaching team that took that strength to a whole new level. We would choose a book of the Bible and then teach our way through it from beginning to end. No pansy topical preaching...

If you haven't checked out the new ESV study Bible, you are missing out. The ESV has quickly become my favorite translation (I used to be a NAS guy - and later a rNAS guy). I haven't purchased the new ESV study Bible yet ... saving up my pennies, so I was excited to find out that Crossway has made the online version free during the month of March. So, if you are interested, check it out here: http://www.esvstudybible.org/online