Archives For Gospel

The Gospel is The Garlic

Erik Raymond —  May 22, 2013 — 1 Comment

The town I grew up in had a lot of Italian people. I would often spend the night at a friend’s house so I could go to Mass with them in the morning and then enjoy a feast at their grandmother’s after church. I can remember one such occurrence when, walking up to the sidewalk I was kicked in the nostrils by an overwhelming and powerful smell. To my untrained adolescent nose this was a strange smell. Upon further research I found out that it was, as you might expect, garlic. Garlic is the staple ingredient in Italian food. It is in everything. If you had a bowl of cereal there it would probably taste like garlic. If you visited with some other friends after dinner, they would know you had garlic. Garlic is a very outspoken, gregarious seasoning.

When I read the Letters of John, particularly the Third Letter, I find him similarly outspoken about “the truth”. This truth is the truth about all that Jesus is and has done for us. In short, the truth is the gospel. When John writes we find that the gospel is everywhere and in everything.

He is almost obsessively preoccupied with the truth. In verse 1 he loves them in truth. In verse 3 he is overjoyed because he has heard of a testimony in the truth. Again in verse 3 he hears they are walking in the truth which causes him to overflow with great joy. He says he has no greater joy than to hear these things (v.4). At the core of John’s soul is his love for the truth of God (gospel). Everything he sees, feels, pursues, loves, and prays for is shaped by the gospel. For the Apostle John, the garlic is the gospel. It is in everything. It is all over his breath. It can’t be contained. It is that outspoken, gregarious spiritual seasoning that gets into every sentence like garlic in every Italian dish.

It is a terrific reminder for us that this type of gospel scent comes by means of intentional exposure and effort. We spend time thinking about, marinating in, praying through, and speaking about the gospel. It is in the fabric of our souls before it becomes the fabric of our conversations. To push the garlic word picture perhaps to its maximum, you can’t sweat out the garlic without eating the garlic. It has got to be in you before it comes out of you.

Whatever else you say about John you have to conclude that this guy was a gospel-manaic. He left the scent behind in his writings.

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How To Spice Up Bland Sermons

Erik Raymond —  May 20, 2013 — 1 Comment

I remember sitting on my couch when it hit me. It was one of those rare moments of clarity amid the dense fog of dejection. I was fretting a bit about my sermon a few hours earlier. I felt like the wife or mom who kept on cooking up the same meals, the same way each week. The balance of spiritual proteins, carbs, and vegetables were not out of whack, but the flavor was. My homiletical seasoning had become flavorless and predictable. In short: my illustrations and word pictures were becoming bland and boring.

It hit me as I sat rubbing my head like I was attempting to coerse a migraine to leave. Jesus commented that “…out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (Lk. 6.45). What was coming out of my mouth in my sermons was precisely what was filling my mind and heart throughout the week.

Think about it for a second. In sermon prep the preacher works hard to get the text into his soul. He pounds it in via reading, meditation, prayer, study, and thinking. What comes out is how the text has been received, processed, integrated, and applied personally. To put it another way, it is like the preacher drops a fishing line into his mind. Attached to it is the meat of the text. As he drags the line through the water of the mind he attracts some objects. You only pull out what is in there. If you go fishing and your hook gets caught on old boots, tires, coke bottles and weeds, it is because that is what is in the water. If your sermons consistently pull out illustrations about sports, your family, running or blowing things up it is because that is what is in there. In my case I was constantly referring to sports, my family, and (strangely) things that detonate. This works for awhile but eventually it becomes a tired old boot on the line.

So how do you spice up bland sermons? If we may apply Jesus’ logic here, then we need to fill our hearts and minds with more stuff. In particular we need to fill it with more homiletically helpful stuff.

Here are my suggestions that I have found personally helpful:
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Is Worshiping Yourself Strange? Yes and No.

Erik Raymond —  May 15, 2013 — 2 Comments

Very helpful quote here from Mike Cosper in his new and helpful book  Rhythms of Grace:

To our imaginations, it’s probably strange (at the least) or gross (at the worst) to envision anyone perpetually exalting himself. We live in a world full of bluster and bragging, where Nicki Minaj boasts “I’m the best,” LeBron James tattoos “Chosen 1” across his shoulders, and everyone from pastors to porn stars are self-celebrating on Twitter and Facebook. The idea that God would be associated with anything like that behavior is disconcerting.

But God’s own self-adoration is nothing like ours. Unlike our own self-congratulatory spirit, God’s view of himself is unmistaken and unexaggerated.

As hymn writer Fredrick Lehman said:

Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made, Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade, To write the love of God above, Would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Though stretched from sky to sky. God’s glory and perfection are inexhaustible. We can’t say enough about how glorious he truly is. The greatest gift he can give us is a revelation of himself. Exalting anything else would be cruel.

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Biblical Submission Operates Out of the Black

Erik Raymond —  May 14, 2013 — Leave a comment

Christians often start off at a significant disadvantage when we talk about a wife’s submission to her husband. Like Commodus’ fateful words to Quintos, after slashing Maximus: “Strap the armor, conceal the wounds” the Christian takes the cultural lacerations and then tries to go toe-to-toe with the common objections. This is always frustrating and often unproductive. Today biblical femininity, when acknowledged, is mocked. It is deemed repressive, antiquated, and unfulfilling.

My suggestion is to deconstruct things a little bit first before diving in too deep.

The widely popular, progressive worldview operates out of the red. There is a lack. In other words, you don’t have something and therefore you need to obtain it. The argument is that people, particularly women need to be liberated. There needs to be freedom. This is the talk of captivity. It’s bondage. The pursuit of self-discovery, progressiveness, and a redefinition of thinking is the cry for freedom, but it is not freedom. It is an acknowledgement of captivity. The striving is a striving for freedom.

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(Reconciling) Kindness and Justice

Erik Raymond —  May 13, 2013 — Leave a comment

As an unbeliever I always struggled between the apparent controversy of God’s kindness and his justice. How can God be both loving and just at the same time? How can he love justice and sinners or sinners and justice without compromising one or the other? It is because of this that I always enjoy watching these twin themes chase themselves around in culture and literature. In the classic Les Miserables Victor Hugo does just that with the law (Javert) and the kindness shown by Jean Val-Jean to Fantine. He can’t stand it.

Those who say, ‘That blackguard of a Javert!’ would be in the right. Mr. Mayor, I do not desire that you should treat me kindly; your kindness roused sufficient bad blood in me when it was directed to others. I want none of it for myself. The kindness which consists in upholding a woman of the town against a citizen, the police agent against the mayor, the man who is down against the man who is up in the world, is what I call false kindness. That is the sort of kindness which disorganizes society. Good God! it is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just. Come! if you had been what I thought you, I should not have been kind to you, not I! You would have seen! Mr. Mayor, I must treat myself as I would treat any other man. When I have subdued malefactors, when I have proceeded with vigor against rascals, I have often said to myself, ‘If you flinch, if I ever catch you in fault, you may rest at your ease!’ I have flinched, I have caught myself in a fault. So much the worse! Come, discharged, cashiered, expelled! That is well. I have arms. I will till the soil; it makes no difference to me. Mr. Mayor, the good of the service demands an example.

It is only in and through the gospel where God can be the just and the justifier (Rom. 3.26). These two truths are not at war but at peace. As Psalm 85 rejoices, “Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other. (Ps. 85.10)

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Marriage is Really About Companionship

Erik Raymond —  May 9, 2013 — Leave a comment

Sound words for marriages plagued by isolationism.

Marriage really is a human covenant of companionship. God wasn’t so much giving Adam a physical helper for the work in the garden as he was giving him a companion.

God knew that he had created a social being, and because of Adam’s social hardwiring, it was not good for him to live without the companionship of one made from him and made like him. You could argue that this is the most basic reason for marriage. God created a lifelong companion for Adam, and his relationship with Eve would exist on earth as a visible reminder of God’s love relationship with people and as the God-ordained means by which the earth would be populated as God designed.

So the character and quality of the friendship between a husband and wife always functions as an accurate measure of the health of their marriage. It is also an accurate barometer of trust. When trust is present between two people, their appreciation and affection will grow, and as these things grow, friendship flourishes. Tripp, What Did You Expect?

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Weather Whiplash and Kingdom Groaning

Erik Raymond —  May 2, 2013 — 5 Comments

A couple of days ago we had to turn on the air conditioner in the house. The temperature outside was over 80 degrees and the temperature inside was nearing the same. This I did even though it bristled against my prideful resolution to wait until May to hit activate the arctic cool. Less than 48 hours later we were in a Winter Storm Warning. You can’t predict this stuff.

I read where someone said this is like Narnia before Aslan, always winter and never Christmas. Well, maybe not quite that bad. This type of thing is not unprecedented in Omaha (or other cooler climates). It actually snowed 2″ on May 9, 1945. I heard recently of a town in Colorado getting snow on the 4th of July.

This type of exaggerated fluctuation helps to remind us of the instability of the world around us. Paul tells us that the creation groans (Rom. 8.22). We witness unpredictable wind, floods, hurricanes, tornados, heat, and cold. Amid the weather whiplash of the last few days we join the chorus with creation awaiting the final liberation and restoration through Christ. Until then we groan in the slush alongside of the wilted tulips.

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