Mark Driscoll on the Gospel

This will get your blood pumping...



HT: Vitamin Z

The Great Civil War

A sermon I preached a couple weeks ago on Romans 7:7-25 just went online over at my church's website. Here it is, if anyone's interested.

Basics Final Reflections

What a conference it was this year! Basics is always a great experience, but this year was really a treat. I've reflected on Monday's messages already, so I'll pick up with Tuesday. There were two morning sessions on Tuesday. In the first, Alistair Begg preached his first message on the importance of persuasive preaching, drawn from 2 Corinthians 5. Alistair gave a great challenge to a largely-reformed crowd to not let our belief in the sovereignty of God become an excuse for dispassionate, unpersuasive preaching. Following a coffee break, John Piper gave his second sermon, "Preaching Regeneration Undiminished," from John 3. It was a fantastic call to pastors to truly comprehend the weight and glory of the new birth, and to know and preach God's great salvific love for his people, a love that is "greater than the love of John 3:16."

After lunch (Chick-fil-A!!!), I attended a seminar by blogger-extraordinaire Tim Challies on "Training Your Church to think Biblically." Challies had some great practical advice, and his Q&A time was especially helpful. After an afternoon break and everybody's favorite dinner, barbeque night, John Lennox preached the evening session on "Using Scripture to Engage the Mind and Imagination." As I remarked before, it was perhaps the most powerful sermon I've ever heard. Take an hour this weekend and listen to it, and I promise you'll end the hour with a more magnificent view of God and his rule than you began it with. Afterwards, we had an informal Q&A with Alistair, a time that is always interesting and - thanks to his wit - very entertaining.

Wednesday morning began with a Q&A time with all the speakers and then concluded with Alistair's second sermon on persuasive preaching, this time from Acts 26. He broke down Paul's address to Agrippa wonderfully, and gave us a powerful charge to take a "foolish" gospel to a "wise" world with full confidence and expectation in its power. It was a great note to end the conference on.

It was a long drive home, complete with an Ohio monsoon and a nail in our tire, so it was certainly good to get back home to my wife and baby girl - who amazes me at how much she can grow up in three days. The conference was a time of tremendous spiritual refreshment and encouragement for me, and I would recommend a trip up next year to any pastor or church leader. Though the speakers have not been set yet, Alistair revealed a short list that includes Tim Keller, C.J. Mahaney, and Sinclair Ferguson. In short, I think we'll be OK.

Basics Audio Now Online

You can now download MP3s of all conference sessions and seminars for free here.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2009 to everybody! Rather than write a lengthy New Year's message, I'll just link to the New Year's sermon I preached to my church last Sunday. Enjoy the new year, and may the Gospel go out in power.

Judge Not

My pastor, Eric Fields, gave this terrific explaination of Matthew 7 during his sermon Sunday on church discipline. It really helped me to understand Jesus’ point better, so I pass it along to you.

“Judge not, that you be not judged,” is one of the most quoted lines from all of Jesus’ words, and is usually yanked completely from its context. So what is the point Jesus is actually making here? Usually, we assume that he means that God will judge us by the same standard we judge others by, or that he's saying that if we judge others then God's going to judge us, but ultimately this makes no sense. God will judge all men and women by one standard – himself. After all, if God judged us by our own standard, we’d all be fine, since we tend to be professionals at comparing ourselves favorably to those around us. Scripture makes it pretty clear that God’s standard of judgment is his own holiness. So, what’s Jesus saying here?

He’s saying that when we judge others, they are going to evaluate us by the same standard we apply to them. If we try to correct our brother, the first thing that he is going to do is evaluate us by that standard and look for the chance to respond with, “You hypocrite!” If I require a certain standard of others, I must be prepared for them to measure me by that same standard. Jesus isn’t saying here that we shouldn’t judge others at all, but that we should turn the mirror on ourselves before we ever look to others. After all, consider the famous “speck in your brother’s eye” illustration he gives in the next verse. He doesn’t suggest that we simply ignore our brother’s speck because of the log in our eye, but he instructs us to tend to our own failings first so that we will be able to clearly correct our brothers. Thus, Jesus’ call here isn’t to merely “live and let live,” but to be rigorous in our personal holiness so that we can encourage others to do the same rather than engage in hypocritical judgment.

It’s easy to see the faults in others while remaining blissfully ignorant of our own. Jesus’ message in Matthew 18 (the central passage of Eric’s sermon) is that we are all accountable to one another, and we have a responsibility to spur one another on in righteousness. This isn’t a license for a judgmental spirit; however, but a call to examine ourselves first against the standard of God’s flawless love, and then to walk alongside others and encourage them to do the same – for if we are to “win our brother” as Jesus calls us to in Matthew 18, we must cleanse all hypocrisy from our hearts and demonstrate to them the righteousness of Christ, not our own. That's a tough calling indeed, but one that God will accomplish in us by his grace.