Thursday, December 4, 2014

Gospel clarity, part 3 (Tim Keller)

In our Sunday community group meetings we are using Tim Keller's Center Church as a jumping off point to discuss the vision for church planting in the Stanwood-Camano area. The vision revolves around three ideals:

1) We will think long and hard about the gospel (the central message of Christianity that J.I. Packer sums up as "God saves sinners") and it's implications for our lives,

2) We will respond to the gospel as a community (not just as isolated individuals), speaking the truth in love (both are needed) to one another so that we become more and more Christ-like, bringing glory to God and joy to us, and

3) We will respond to God's grace in Jesus by seeking to engage the spiritual and physical needs of those in our community.

Keller touches on all three of these topics in a brilliant way. His clarifications on the gospel are especially helpful and practical. Here's a snippet:

"Think for a moment of all the ways you can say no to ungodly behavior. You can say:

No-because I'll look bad.
No-because I'll be excluded from the social circles I want to belong to.
No-because then God will not give me health, wealth, and happiness.
No-because God will send me to hell.
No-because I'll hate myself in the morning and lose my self-respect.

Virtually all of these incentives use self-centered impulses of the heart to force compliance to external rules, but they do very little to change the heart itself. The motive behind them is not love for God. It is a way of using God to get beneficial things: self-esteem, prosperity, or social approval...

But the truths of the gospel, brought home by the Spirit, slowly but surely help us grasp in a new way how safe and secure, how loved and accepted, we are in Christ. Through the gospel, we come to base our identity not on what we have achieved but on what has been achieved for us in Christ" (68-69).

Keller is fond of pointing out how legalism (looking for salvation in our obedience and goodness) leads to both despair and pride, depending on how well we're keeping up to our standards at any given moment. But the gospel leads to both confidence and humility.

"The gospel destroys pride, because it tells us we are so lost that Jesus had to die for us. And it also destroys fearfulness, because it tells us that nothing we can do will exhaust his love for us...The gospel leads us to do the right thing not for our sake but for God's sake, for Christ's sake, out of a desire to know, resemble, please, and love the One who saved us. This kind of motivation can only grow in a heart deeply touched by grace" (69).

Searching our hearts to see where the gospel has yet to pierce is a never-ending process. Thanks be to God that our acceptance and favor depend on his sweat, blood, and tears and not ours.

All are welcome to join our community group Sunday evenings at 5 at our house on Camano. Come to grow in God's grace, to learn about our vision to church plant, or just to hang out with some (mostly) cool people!