I’ve recently read three books that I feel would be worth your time as well and wanted to share those here.  The first, on preaching, is Preaching the Cross, which comes out of the Together for The Gospel movement.  Dever, Duncan, Mahaney, and Mohler combine with John MacArthur, John Piper, and R.C. Sproul to bring this fantastic little book on the preaching and its central theme, the cross.  Piper’s chapter on preaching as expository exultation phenomenal and is alone worth the price of the book.  This book is well worth your time as a preacher to help you improve the God-given craft that you are entrusted with.

Next, I would recommend a little book on re-planting a church entitled Church Planting is for Wimps by Mike McKinley.  McKinley took on the daunting task of pastoring a dead church with the mission of seeing it revitalized as a gospel witness in its community.  His little book chronicles his journey through Capitol Hill Baptist Church to Guilford Baptist Church and the work that God has done along the way.  This book should serve as a great encouragement to pastors who are struggling in difficult churches.

Finally, in the realm of aplogetics, I would recommend to you, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, by Craig Blomberg.  Certainly, this book drags a little in some places, but the information contained within its pages will serve as a fantastic reference resource on the shelf of any pastor or lay person concerned with defending the reliability, not only of the gospels, but of all of God’s word.

Recently, on a Wednesday night, I shared some thoughts about our responsibility as Christians to engage culture. Al Mohler has defined our (American) culture using seven characteristics, each of which begin with the word self.

• Self-fulfillment. We are a culture that seeks to satisfy ourselves, seen primarily in the triumph of the therapeutic culture. Self-help books and self-therapy books abound.
• Self-sufficiency. We actually brag about this one. I did it my way all by myself. This is American, but this is not necessarily godly.
• Self-definition. We define what it means to be human (the abortion debate, the cloning debate, and even the designer birth debate), what it means to be male and female (the gay marriage debate), what it means to be _______ (insert your own).
• Self-absorption. We are totally focused on ourselves. We have back decks and back yards, no longer do we value front porches and neighbors. We regularly see divorce because “I wasn’t happy…I needed to do this for me.”
• Self-transcendence. This suggests that we can pick up bits and pieces of religion from where ever we want and that will be good enough. We recognize the inherit spirituality within ourselves, but we fool ourselves into believing that we can define and dictate God.
• Self-enhancement. This is the idea that we can actually make ourselves better than God did. This abounds with the ideas that we can extend life, with parents who give breast augmentation to their kids for graduation gifts, with liposuction, and botox.
• Self-Security. We believe ourselves to be relatively secure. Though we say things like “You aren’t promised tomorrow,” few of us rarely believe that to the very core of our beings. We are pretty confident that tomorrow will come and that it will be pretty good (nearly half of all Americans).

As Christian people, we are called to live in our culture, but to do so with the intention of changing our culture. We are not supposed to look like our culture. The Christian life is a counter-cultural life. As we seek to live out the gospel and share the gospel with our friends, relatives, co-workers, and neighbors, let me encourage you to be different. We are to be defined less by “self” and more by Christ. He is our ultimate judge. All that we do should be to bring glory to him, not to satisfy ourselves. If simply take Christ at his word to love him with all of our hearts and to love our neighbors as our selves, then we will see that our culture has lost its bearing.

As the summer draws to a close and as we look forward to the fall, look for your fulfillment in Christ. Do not buy the lies of our culture, instead, accept the truths of God’s word and seek to honor him with your life. Focus on Him and others, and watch as God uses you to transform your world with the gospel.

Mohler’s complete chapter can be found in Preaching the Cross.

It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher

- George Whitefield

I tasked our new youth and discipleship pastor (Luke Tolbert) with helping me to develop some good stuff we could put into the hands of fathers in our church.  Recently, I’ve been blessed to hear, on several occasions, “I want to lead my family like you talk about, but can you help me understand just how to do that.”  We know that most men are not going to read Kostenberger’s God, Marriage, and Family, and even if they did, they would find it heavy on theory and light on application.  They are fixers and not readers.  Men want short and concise “how to” instructions.  So, basically, we are working on that “how to” guide to put into the hands of our dads.

Though this resource is still in the development stage, Luke compiled a great list of online resources that we will be synthesizing to give to our guys here.  Maybe you can use this list or you might even have something to add.  Feel free to do so.  I’ll be sure to make the finished product available to you as soon as it is to us.

• Ideas for Family Worship from The Resurgence
• Family Worship Guide.net - This is a website that has a worship guide for every day of the week. It is available in a PDF that can be downloaded; I think you can even download the entire month’s devotions. The website also has a good FAQ and resource section for families.
• The Radical Experiment - David Platt’s website has a weekly family worship guide alone with a simple “how-to-manual” that is a little wordy but is a good resource.
• Acts 29 Blog - There are two recent blog entries concerning fathers that I have enjoyed reading. One was on Six Ways Fathers Pursue Christ in their Fatherhood and the other is 10 Practical Pastor Dad Tips which is a good practical guide.
• Pastor-Dad ebook - While we are talking about Acts 29 and Mark Driscoll, he recently wrote a free ebook titled Pastor-Dad. I have not read through it so we should probably not start mass producing them for the congregation right away, but I have heard good things about it and the sections I read so far are pretty good.
• Seeds Family Worship - This is a website that Desiring God recommends as they have put Scripture to music so that kids can memorize it. They also have a list of resources and books that we could look at if we want to purchase some devotional guides to put in the hands of the fathers of our church.
• How I Pastor My Family - This is a practical guide written by an Acts 29 church planter.

What is the Gospel? Greg Gilbert begins his little book by asserting the fact that many Christians have assumed the gospel and have even experienced the gospel, but that they cannot clearly articulate what the gospel is.

Enter Gilbert’s book.  This little book is a fantastic primer on the gospel.  We need to constantly be reminded of the truths of the gospel, and Gilbert has done a great job of that.  Further, keeping in mind the fact that 90% of college graduates will never read another non-fiction book after graduating, the length of Gilbert’s book makes it approachable by Christians of all types.  he has clearly articulated the gospel in a way that is understandable, grace-filled, and applicable to the Christian life.

You will not find anything new in What is the Gospel?, but that is really a good thing.  The gospel is good news, but it is not “new” news.  He spells out the gospel in four issues: God. Man. Christ. Response.

We are accountable to the God who created us.  We have sinned against that God and will be judged.  But God has acted in Jesus Christ to save us, and we take hold of that salvation by repentance from sin and faith in Jesus.

Greg Gilbert reminds us all that the gospel is not second-tier in the Christian faith, that the cross is the center-piece of the gospel, and that the gospel cannot and should not be improved upon,

The pressure to find a “bigger,” more “relevant” gospel seems to have taken hold of a great many people.  Again and again, in book after book, we see descriptions of the gospel that end up relegating the cross to a secondary position.  In its place are declarations that the heart of the gospel is that God is remaking the world, or that he has promised a kingdom that will set everything right, or that he is calling us to join him in transforming our culture.  The result is that over and over again, the death of Jesus in the place of sinners is assumed, marginalized, or even (sometimes deliberately) ignored.

In What is the Gospel?, Greg Gilbert has put the gospel back front and center and has given Christians a great resource to not only proclaim the good news, but to adequately define that good news.

Justin Taylor has highlighted a new album by John Mark McMillan. See video of “Death in His Grave” below.

Shaun Groves on John Mark McMillan new album, The Medicine: “I can’t recommend it highly enough. Beautiful, innovative, poetic, intelligent, subversive, theologically robust, sonic sweet tea and biscuits, transcendent.”

Interesting statistics on young women and their use of Facebook.

While the study covers all of social media, it’s clear that women in the 18-34 range are focused on their Facebook accounts. More than half of young women (57%) say they talk to people online more than face-to-face. A full 39% of them proclaim themselves Facebook addicts, while 34% of young women make Facebook the first thing they do when they wake up, even before brushing their teeth or going to the bathroom.

Last week, Al Mohler posted this horrifying article on feminism and abortion.

“f you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.” That statement, published for all the world to see, perfectly distills the inescapable logic of the abortion rights argument. It is based on a willingness to kill — and on the horrifying audacity to call this killing “the lesser evil.

Finally, check out the work that Aaron Coe is doing with SendNYC. They have a goal to plant 100 new churches in NYC in the next 10 years and they need your help.

Mission: SendNYC exists to mobilize and equip leaders in order to plant gospel-centered churches in New York City, North America, and cities around the world.

Death In His Grave (Performance Video) from john mark mcmillan on Vimeo.

I’m thankful for the resurgence of expository preaching in recent years.  In fact, in He is Not Silent, Al Mohler has gone so far as to say that, “the only form of authentic Christian preaching is expository preaching.”  But, there continues to be much confusion in many circles about what exactly expository preaching is.  For many, expository preaching is NEVER topical, and always involves preaching through entire books of the Bible.  In some circles, to suggest anything less is nearly heretical.  For these folks, expository preaching is a method or a style.

I would like to suggest, however, that expository preaching is much more about conviction–a conviction that the Word of God is sufficient and that it accomplishes all that God intends for it to accomplish–than it is about method.  Ligon Duncan has this to say in Preaching the Cross:

By expository preaching, I don’t mean one particular style or method of preaching, but a self-conscious, principled commitment to preaching in such a way that the Scripture itself is supplying the main theme, principle headings, and central application in our proclamation.

In other words, a commitment to expository preaching is a commitment to allowing the text speak for itself.  It is a conviction that God’s word says it better than I can and that “good” preaching happens when the preacher gets out of the way and allows the Word of God to be heard clearly.  You may preach expository sermons in a strictly systematic outline, you may preach in narrative form, you may wear a suit or you may wear flip flops.  Your sermons may be built around 4-6 week themes or you may elaborate for years from the book of Romans.  The most important factor is that the Scripture sets the agenda for your messages and that it is allowed to speak clearly in the lives of your hearers.

“The apostle Paul was consistent.  Paul desired “that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel” (Ephesians 6:19).  When he said hard things he was able to remind those who knew him how consistent his life was with the gospel (Acts 20:18; 2 Timothy 3:10).  So make sure the message you share is consistent with the message you bear.  Endeavor, by God’s grace, to think through how to keep careful watch over your life as well as your doctrine by living out the gospel.”

-J. Mack Stiles, Marks of the Messenger (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010), 52.

“The healthy evangelist is asking these questions and looking for answers so as to guard the gospel.  Here is the critical test.  Could you have preached that sermon if Christ had not died on the cross?  Could you have developed that Christian leadership principle had Christ not been crucified?  I’m not saying be impractical-the Bible has much to say about being practical-but make sure that the practical is tied to the message of Jesus.  Otherwise we are on the road to an assumption that will lost the gospel.”

-J. Mack Stiles, Marks of the Messenger (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010), 41.

Mohler, Jr., R. Albert. Atheism Remix. Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 2008. 

“Albert Mohler is a steady guide, unremittingly clear-headed.”  This John Piper quote dawns the cover of many of Dr. Mohler’s books on the social landscape that lies before the contemporary Christian.  This Piper quote provides a concise description of Atheism Remix published in 2008 by Crossway.  Not only is this book “clear-headed”, but is even-handed in its approach to the “New Atheism” that is sweeping across America and Western Europe.  Atheism Remix is a treatment of the work of “The Four Horsemen of the New Atheist Apocalypse,” (39) as Mohler calls them, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.  Atheism is not new, as Mohler points out (17), but these new atheist are, “evangelistic in intent and ambitious in hope.  They see atheism as the only plausible worldview for our times, and they see belief in God as downright dangerous –an artifact of the past that we can no longer afford to tolerate, much less encourage.” (12) 

Mohler first discusses the New Atheism in relationship to it End-Game of Secularism.  He points out that it was, “only after the Enlightenment that atheism became a real intellectual force.” (18)  It would progress more rapidly through the lives of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud.  The writings and influence of these men would lead to the rise of the, “explicitly atheistic state,” (27) one void of religious influence where, “Marx’s assumption that religion is ‘the opiate of the masses’” (27) had to be fully embraced and, “that opiate must be taken from the people and replaced with the vision of the new Communist man.” (27)  Mohler codifies Max Weber’s arguments when he concludes that the end goal of both the contemporary secularist and the New Atheist is that, “eventually modernity would lead to society’s disenchantment with the enchanted world, by which he meant a world in which God is necessary and meaningful, and its entrance into a disenchanted (or secular) world.” (29)  This is clearly the end-game of the New Atheist. 

Mohler then moves on to discuss the assault that this New Atheism is having on theism.  In this chapter he gives background history on each of the “Four Horsemen,” shows their credentials to be in this debate, and briefly describes their contributions to the atheist/theist debate.  One of the most insightful quotes of the entire book comes from this chapter and is a stern warning to those who lead Christ’s churches.  In reflecting on the early religious training of both Dawkins and Hitches, Mohler writes, “There is something to be learned here.  A tepid introduction to Christianity turns out to be a poor preparation for life, and an even poorer preparation for hearing the gospel.” (53)  Dr. Mohler then spends the rest of the chapter discussing eight characteristics that set the New Atheism “apart from older forms of atheism and that frame its challenge to Christian belief.” (54)

Carl F. H. Henry said, “the world is looking for an evangelical demonstration of Christianity, not merely an intellectual defense.” (65)  In the third chapter of Atheism Remix, Al Mohler takes the reader through a multitude of defenses that should be prevalent in the arsenal of the contemporary Christian.  Much of this chapter is dedicated to the responses of Alister McGrath and Alvin Plantinga to the work of the New Atheists.  He does point out, however, that, “the Achilles heel of the critiques offered by McGrath and Plantinga might be their own acceptance of the larger project of evolution” (84) and as such, “the evangelical Christian…must remember that the burden of our concern is not merely to refute atheism or to argue for the intellectual credibility of theism in any generic or minimal form.  Instead, our task is to present, to teach, to explain and to defend Christian theism.” (84; emphasis his)

Finally Mohler discusses the Future of Christianity and its relationship with the New Atheism.  He says, “Christians must summon the courage to respond to this challenge with the full measure of conviction and with a bold assertion of biblical theism.” (90)  That is not, however, how many of those who occupy the liberal side of the theological spectrum deem this debate.  Mohler interacts with several of those liberal theologians and their writings in this final chapter.  Tina Beattie, for example, “accuses Hitchens and Dawkins of making the same mistake made by fundamentalists–reading the Bible as if it is true.” (93)  Mohler shows that clearly this is not the answer.  In his book The Disappearance of God, Mohler discusses Gerd Lüdemann, a theologian who after spending his life denying, “the resurrection of Jesus, the virgin birth, and eventually the totality of the gospel,” (Disapperance, 108) finally came to say that, “a Christian is someone who prays to Christ and believes in what is promised by Christian doctrine.  So I asked myself” ‘Do I pray to Jesus, do I pray to the God of the Bible?’ And I don’t do that.  Quite the reverse.” (Disapperance, 110)  Lüdemann now goes after liberal theologians who he says, “should give up their claim on Christianity for the sake of honesty.” (Disapperance, 111)   This is the point Mohler returns to time and time again in this last chapter of Atheism Remix.  He concludes with this sobering statement:  “The New Atheists are certainly right about one very important thing–it’s atheism or biblical theism.  There is nothing in between.” (108)

Atheism Remix is an important read for pastors because the books being distributed by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are front and center on bookshelves across our country.  Mohler points out their books have spent significant time on the New York Times Best Seller List (43). As pastors, we are going to increasingly face this tidal wave of unbelief.  1 Peter 3:15 ESV tells us to, “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.”  Atheism Remix is a good place to begin preparing that defense.  The enemy we face is always ready.  The New Atheists are prepared to give a defense for their lack of hope.  Al Mohler has laid out for us their battle plans and in so doing leaves us no excuse to have our defenses down.