Here, There and Back Again

Here are some interesting items online!…

Desiring God Holiday Sale. ‘Tis the season! Start your holiday shopping with some edifying resources from John Piper at great bargains.

Increase in depression and suicide among pastors. Totally sobering. This is why the Holy Spirit inspired verses like Hebrews 13:17. This is why Christians should love their pastors and pray for them rather than criticize and gossip about them.

“The Day I Went to Church.” An Aussie describes his first visit to a local church. Oh, let’s reach out to visitors in love Bethel Grace! Thanks for the link, Donovan!

Free Tim Keller Sermons. Pastor Tim Keller, of Redeemer Prespyterian Church in New York, has recently made his sermons available free of charge. Awesome resource!

Gospel Coalition Conference Audio and Video

“Entrusted with the Gospel“, the 2009 Gospel Coalition conference, was last week. The conference had an incredible line-up of speakers.

Justin Taylor:

The audio and video from The Gospel Coalition conference are now available online for free. Most of them are expositions of 2 Timothy:

• Tim Keller, “The Grand Demythologizer: The Gospel and Idolatry” (Acts 19:21-41)
• John Piper, “Feed the Flame of God’s Gift: Unashamed Courage in the Gospel” (2 Timothy 1:1-12)
• Phil Ryken, “The Pattern of Sound Words” (2 Timothy 1:13-2:13)
• Mark Driscoll, “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth” (2 Timothy 2:14-26)
• K. Edward Copeland, “Shadowlands: Pitfalls and Parodies of Gospel-Centered Ministry” (2 Timothy 3:1-9)
• Bryan Chapell, “Preach the Word!” (2 Timothy 3:10-4:5)
• Ajith Fernando, “Gospel-Faithful Mission in the New Christendom“
• Panel Discussion: Tim Keller, John Piper, Ligon Duncan and Crawford Loritts (chair: Stephen Um)
• Ligon Duncan, “Finishing Well” (2 Timothy 4:6-22)
• Don Carson, “That By All Means I Might Win Some’: Faithfulness and Flexibility in Gospel Proclamation” (1 Corinthians 9:19-23)

The Audio from most of the worskshop sessions is also available:

• Buster Brown, “Preaching in a Christianized Culture“
• Graham Cole, “Homosexuality and the Bible: Texts, Hermeneutics, and Pastoral Wisdom”
• Joshua Harris: Ministering in a Church-Hopping Society
• CJ Mahaney: The Pastor’s Charge 
• Thabiti Anyabwile: “The Decline of African-American Theology”
• Steven Chin: “Working Faithfully Under a Senior Pastor”
• Graham Cole: “Homosexuality and the Bible: Texts, Hermeneutics, and Pastoral Wisdom”
• K. Edward Copeland and Charlie Dates: “Mentoring Younger Pastors”
• Andy Davis: “The Gospel and Social Action”
• David Helm: “Biblical Reflections on Building a Staff”
• Bill Kynes: “Complementarianism: Definition and Priorities”
• Crawford Loritts: “Staying Faithful, Staying Relevant: The Use and Abuse of Polemical Preaching”
• Tom Nelson and Matt Perman: “The Gospel and Money”
• Colin Smith: “Transformational Expository Preaching”
• Stephen Um: “On Ministry and Revolving Doors: Practical Challenges and Ideas for Ministry in a Mobile Society”
• Sandy Willson: “Gospel Mission to the World: Arrogance or Love?”

Three of the sessions had corrupt audio, and the files are being worked on. It may be some time, however, before they become available:

• Michael Bullmore, “The Functional Centrality of the Gospel”
• Tim Savage, “Power in Weakness: The Heart of Gospel Ministry”
• Scotty Smith, “A Biblical Theology of Worship: On Preference and Other Matters”

~Donovan

Gospel-Centered Mercy Ministry

My buddy David Quinn, who works for Children’s Hunger Fund, told me about this video when he and I got together earlier this week. It’s very biblical, balanced, and helpful. Check it out:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

~ Donovan

True humility flows out of the gospel of grace…

Tim Keller:

“Martin Luther had the basic insight that moralism is the default mode of the human heart. Even Christians who believe the gospel of grace on one level can continue to operate as if they have been saved by their works. In “The Great Sin” in Mere Christianity, Lewis writes, “If we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good—above all, that we are better than someone else—I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the Devil.”

Gracious, self-forgetful humility should be one of the primary things that distinguishes Christian believers from the many other types of moral, decent people in the world. But I think it is fair to say that humility, which is a key differentiating mark of the Christian, is largely missing in the church. Nonbelievers, detecting the stench of sanctimony, turn away.

Some will say, “Phariseeism and moralism are not our culture’s big problems right now. Our problems are license and antinomianism. There is no need to talk about grace all the time to postmodern people.” But postmodern people have been rejecting Christianity for years, thinking that it was indistinguishable from moralism. Only if you show them there’s a difference—that what they rejected wasn’t real Christianity—will they even begin to listen again.”

Read the whole article (in the latest edition of Christianity Today) here.

~Donovan

HT: Justin Taylor 

Tim Keller @ Google

Tim Keller is a very helpful guide in addressing some of the questions/objections presented most often by those opposing Christianity today. The video below shows Keller’s lecture and Q&A session at the Google headquarters:

 

To see a similar lecture and Q&A session at Cal Berkeley, click here.  

Keller addresses these issues more thoroughly in his book “The Reason for God”.

~ Donovan

The Gospel Coalition

Some of you may not know about The Gospel Coalition. Click here to see their website and watch an introductory video.

Tim Keller @ Berkeley: Belief in an age of Skepticism?

Tim Keller is one of the sharpest minds in Christianity today. In his nearly two decades as a pastor in New York, he has had much experience tackling the questions of today’s skeptics… He is a very helpful voice on how to communicate biblical truth in a postmodern age.

This presentation at UC Berkeley is based on some of the material in his book, “The Reason for God: Belief in an age of Skepticism“. The lecture is followed by a Q&A session. To view or listen to this presentation, click here.

To read our earlier post on the book, click here.

“The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism”

This is another book I want to read soon… It’s by Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. I consider him one of the most sharp and insightful, biblically-centered theologians of our day, and a very helpful voice on how to communicate biblical truth in a postmodern age…

This is what he has to say about why he wrote this book:

“I’ve been working for some time on a book for the ordinary (which means very sharp) spiritually skeptical New Yorker. Ever since I got to New York nearly two decades ago I’ve wished I had a volume to give people that not only answered objections to Christianity (what has been called ‘apologetics’) but also positively presented the basics of the gospel in an accessible yet substantial way. I had some books that did the one and some that did the other, but only one did both—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. As you know, I think Lewis’ book is peerless, and foolish would be the author who tried to replace him!

However, the issues in the public discourse around Christianity have become much more complex than they were in the mid and late 20th century. The questions are now not just philosophical (e.g. Is there evidence for God’s existence?) They are also now cultural (Doesn’t strong faith make a multicultural society impossible?), political (Doesn’t orthodox religion undermine freedom?) and personal. Also fifty years ago, when C.S. Lewis was writing, there was general agreement that rational argument and empirical method were the best ways to discover truth. That consensus has vanished. Today there are deep disagreements over how we know things and how certain we can be about anything. Most of the older books presenting Christianity now are only persuasive and even comprehensible to a very narrow range of people.

All this means that there is a great need for new literature that speaks to our time and says, “Christianity makes sense.””

This video sums up how Keller has tried to achieve that goal in this book:

For more information about this book, click here.

For Tim Challies’ review of this book, click here.

~Donovan