Meet the Osama Bin Laden of the New Testament
Today’s Christians and churches don’t need more innovation or better programs or bigger buildings or newer worship songs as much as we need a constantly deepening confidence in the power of the gospel.
Today’s Christians and churches don’t need more innovation or better programs or bigger buildings or newer worship songs as much as we need a constantly deepening confidence in the power of the gospel.
Worship of the true and living God happens when we vulnerably trust in the certainty of God for the unpredictability of the future.
In telling the biblical story, we don’t need people to glean from our wisdom. They must encounter the living God.
Our common mistake is not so much taking God out of the story as much as we make him a passive object instead of the active subject.
The Holy Spirit works with this Word-shaped memory to kindle in us a mystical imagination capable of gospel improvisation.
This core dynamic of Christian discipleship consists in the crisis and process of learning to be “strong in the Lord and in his mighty power,” who is the Holy Spirit.
Apostles solve problems by finding people full of the Spirit and wisdom, commissioning them for work, and letting them loose.
God chooses the unlikely to accomplish the impossible; the unconventional to overcome the invincible.
The gospel offends all power structures, for it produces a people who cannot be controlled by any power save the Lordship of Jesus Christ.