Andy Naselli

Thoughts on Theology

Practical Theology

God, Make Me a Man

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Darrin Patrick, Church Planter: The Man, the Message, the Mission (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 12:

Being a man is about being tough and tender.

I have three beautiful daughters . . . . But I also have a son, Drew, and because of my keen awareness of and pastoral interaction with the cultural influence of Bans [i.e., “a hybrid of both boy and man,” p. 9], I know that my work is cut out for me when it comes to raising a godly man. As with all of us dads with similar aspirations, my only hope is the Holy Spirit. So I recently wrote a little prayer that reflects the kind of men we need. Drew and I pray this prayer together almost every night. It is a prayer for him and for me:

God, make me a man with thick skin and a soft heart. Make me a man who is tough and tender. Make me tough so I can handle life. Make me tender so I can love people. God, make me a man.

Watch Darrin explain that prayer from about 47:30 to 49:00 in the below video: [Read more…] about God, Make Me a Man

Two New Children’s Books by Matthias Media

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Here are two new children’s books by Matthias Media that you can view online for free:

They’re not our favorites, but they’re not bad.

More info:

You can view them online for free in two ways:

  1. Read them online by clicking “Sample Pages” at the top of the screen (here and here).
  2. Watch them being read online via YouTube at the bottom of the screen (here and here). The resolution of the pictures is not very good, but the narrator has an Aussie accent. (Stories are more interesting with British, Scottish, Irish, or Aussie accents!)

Church Planting Is for Wimps

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That’s the provocative title of a little book I recently couldn’t put down once I started reading it:

Mike McKinley. Church Planting Is for Wimps: How God Uses Messed-up People to Plant Ordinary Churches That Do Extraordinary Things. IX Marks. Wheaton: Crossway, 2010. 126 pp. [Cf. Mark Dever’s interview of Mike.]

The title may mislead you to think that this isn’t a book for you, but it’s instructive on many levels for church leaders in general—not just for those who are planting or revitalizing churches.

Mike is a witty, self-effacing writer, and the book is light and entertaining, serious and insightful. I probably laughed out loud while reading it about as frequently as I do when reading Carl Trueman. Highly recommended.

What Does It Mean to Love God with Your Mind?

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John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 79:

What does it mean to love God “with all your mind” [Matt 22:37]? I take it to mean that we direct our thinking in a certain way; namely, our thinking should be wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.

Chapter 6 (pp. 79–88) unpacks that definition.

Piper has thought about that definition for a long time. As recently as the mid-1990s, he told Don Carson that he wasn’t sure what it means to love God with your mind.

Cf. D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 484:

Noll and others often cite Jesus’ injunction to love the Lord your God your God “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30) as if that justifies all intellectual effort expended by a Christian. John Piper, in a private conversation, thoughtfully commented that he was unsure what the passage means: What precisely does it mean to love God with one’s mind? It is not obvious. This is not the place to embark on a full-scale exegesis. Remembering, however, that the “heart” in biblical thought is not so much the seat of the emotions as the seat of thought and of the whole person, both “loving God with your heart” and “loving God with your mind” are bound up with thinking the right things about God. They cannot simply be equated with all intellectual endeavor undertaken by a Christian, even though such endeavor must be undertaken coram Deo. But whatever the full sweep of this injunction, it cannot mean less than a God-inspired delight in all of God’s thoughts insofar as he has disclosed them, and a God-given determination to dethrone all competing systems of thought and bring them into captivity to the gospel (cf. 2 Cor. 10:5). And that requires constant, thoughtful Bible reading, theological reflection, interaction with Christian thinkers from the past, humble assessment of the currents of our age and courageous determination not to become their slave.

It is precisely here, I fear, that many evangelical intellectuals have failed.

Pitfalls and Benefits of Small Group Bible Study

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My church’s small groups started meeting together again last night, and this week I benefited immensely from reading this practical and insightful new book:

Orlando Saer. Iron Sharpens Iron: Leading Bible-Oriented Small Groups That Thrive. Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2010. 142 pp.

In the opening chapter (which you can read here), Saer explains three pitfalls and four benefits of small group Bible study (pp. 10–22):

Potential Pitfalls of Small Group Bible Study

  1. The vertical pushed out by the horizontal: they can turn into little more than social groups.
  2. The message sidelined by the method: members can become addicts to one way of encountering God.
  3. The blind led by the blind: meetings can become simply opportunities to pool ignorance.

Benefits of Small Group Bible Study

  1. A good place to listen to God: each can help the others study the Bible.
  2. A good place to talk to God: each can pray for the others in an informed way.
  3. A good place to care for one another: each can carry the others’ burdens.
  4. A good place from which to reach the lost: members can work together to advance the gospel.

Judgmentalism

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That’s the title of chapter 17 in this painfully convicting book:

Jerry Bridges. Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2007. 185 pp.

Judgmentalism is a sinfully “critical spirit, a condemning attitude” (D. A. Carson,  Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and His Confrontation with the World , p. 105). We can be judgmental about nearly anything.

The point of this post is not to debate disputed positions; it’s about our disposition. It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong; it’s about applying the gospel to our sinfully critical spirits and condemning attitudes. We might think of judgmental people as those with “stricter” standards, but people with “looser” standards can be judgmental, too. Whatever our views may be on disputed issues like the ones below, we can be guilty of judgmentalism. Jesus died for that sin.

When my mind is fixed on the gospel, I have ample stimulation to show God’s love to other people. For I am always willing to show love to others when I am freshly mindful of the love that God has shown me. (Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer , p. 24)

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Jerry Bridges (b. 1929) turned 82 last month. He’s a prolific author and a humble, gospel-centered man. You can get to know him a little better via C. J. Mahaney’s brief text and audio interviews. (See also his books and audio.)

Below I quote portions of his chapter on judgmentalism (pp. 141–48, headings added). This will likely whet your appetite to read the whole chapter, especially in light of chapters 1–6.

Introduction

The sin of judgmentalism is one of the most subtle of our “respectable” sins because it is often practiced under the guise of being zealous for what is right. It’s obvious that within our conservative evangelical circles there are myriads of opinions on everything from theology to conduct to lifestyle and politics. Not only are there multiple opinions but we usually assume our opinion is correct. That’s where our trouble with judgmentalism begins. We equate our opinions with truth. (p. 141)

Example 1: Dress

I grew up in the mid-twentieth century, when people dressed up to go to church. Men wore jackets and ties (usually suits and ties) and women wore dresses. Sometime in the 1970s, men began to show up at church wearing casual pants and open-collar shirts. Many women began to wear pants. For several years, I was judgmental toward them. Didn’t they have any reverence for God? Would they dress so casually if they were going to an audience with the president? That sounded pretty convincing to me. [Read more…] about Judgmentalism

Worship Traditions

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John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God (A Theology of Lordship; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010), 237–38:

[The Protestant Reformers] used a very broad brush to eliminate from their theology and worship anything they considered contrary to Scripture or supplementary to Scripture. So the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture has served as a weapon against the imposition of extrabiblical notions on the conscience of the believer.

Nevertheless, nearly five hundred years have passed since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and during that time Protestantism itself has accumulated a large amount of tradition. Some of this is good, some bad. My present point is that it is just as important as ever to distinguish human tradition from the norms of Scripture and to fight any attempt to put the two on the same level of authority. Some cases in point:

. . . . Many traditions have also developed concerning worship and other aspects of church life. These concern the style and instrumentation of worship songs, the order of events in worship, degree of formality or informality, and so on. Many of these are not commanded by Scripture, but many are in accord with broad biblical principles. The problem is that church people will sometimes defend their particular practice as mandatory on all Christians, and they will criticize as spiritually inferior churches that use different styles and patterns. Often the criteria used are not scriptural, but aesthetic. People argue that this style of music is more dignified, that that liturgy is more ancient, and so forth. These aesthetic and historical criteria are often used in place of Scripture, leading to the condemnations of practices that Scripture permits and commanding of practices that Scripture does not command. That, too, in my judgment, violates the principle of sola Scriptura, the sufficiency of Scripture.

Related: John MacArthur on How to Serve Christians Who Are Needlessly Restrictive

Loving People You Don’t Like

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D. A. Carson, Love in Hard Places (Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), pp. 52–57 (numbering added):

Not all Christians face persecuting enemies, but all Christians face little enemies. We encounter people whose personality we intensely dislike—

  1. an obstreperous deacon or warden or bishop;
  2. a truly revolting relative;
  3. an employee or employer who specializes in insensitivity, rudeness, and general arrogance;
  4. a business competitor more unscrupulous, not to say more profitable, than you are;
  5. the teenager whose boorishness is exceeded only by his or her unkemptness;
  6. the elderly duffers who persist in making the same querulous demands whenever you are in a hurry;
  7. the teachers who are so intoxicated by their own learning that they forget they are first of all called to teach students, not a subject;
  8. the students so impressed by their own ability or (if they come from certain cultures) so terrified by the shame of a low grade that they whine and wheedle for an “A” they have not earned;
  9. people with whom you have differed on some point of principle who take all differences in a deeply personal way and who nurture bitterness for decades, stroking their own self-righteousness and offended egos as they go;
  10. insecure little people who resent and try to tear down those who are even marginally more competent than they;
  11. the many who lust for power and call it principle;
  12. the arrogant who are convinced of their own brilliance and of the stupidity of everyone else.

The list is easily enlarged. [Read more…] about Loving People You Don’t Like