Redeemer Church in Lubbock, Texas, recently invited Jonathan Dodson to speak at their Missional Living Conference. The conference was built around the Three Gospel Conversions based on Colossians 1:15-20. Those familiar with his talks at LEAD 09 will note that these new talks introduce a fresh theological and practical perspective on the Three Conversions. Both audio and video are available.

• The Gospel & American Christianity: This message deconstructs the dualism of American Christianity in order to reconstruct a whole Gospel around Jesus Christ as Lord.
• Community in American Christianity: This message demonstrates the communal character of the Gospel, unpacking very practical ways to cultivate “steady state community.”
• Everyday Mission in America: This message shows how mission is not optional but essential, spending considerable time on how to live "everyday life with gospel intentionality.”
• How a Church Renews a City: This message shows how Gospel communities on mission is God's design to renew cities.

Docent Research

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Dead But Alive: Click | View Series

Romans 6:11-12—"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions."

How intimately the believer's duties are interwoven with his privileges! Because he is alive to God, he is to renounce sin, since that corrupt thing belongs to his estate of death.

Sin Wants To Reign Over You

"Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions."

1. Sin has great power. It is in you and will strive to reign.
• Sin remains as an outlaw, hiding away in your nature.
• Sin remains as a plotter, planning your overthrow.
• Sin remains as an enemy, warring against the law of your mind.
• Sin remains as a tyrant, worrying and oppressing the true life.
2. Sin's field of battle is the body.
• Its wants—hunger, thirst, cold, etc.—may become occasions of sin, by leading to murmuring, envy, covetousness, robbery.
• Its appetites may crave excessive indulgence and, unless continually curbed, will easily lead to evil.
• Its pains and infirmities, through engendering impatience and other faults, may produce sin.
• Its pleasures, also, can readily become incitements to sin.
• Its influence upon the mind and spirit may drag our noble nature down to the groveling materialism of earth.
3. The body is mortal, and we shall be completely delivered from sin when set free from our present material frame, if indeed grace reigns within. Till then we shall find sin lurking in one member or another of "this vile body."
4. Meanwhile we must not let it reign.
• If it reigned over us, it would be our god. It would prove us to be under death and not alive to God.
• It would cause us unbounded pain and injury if it ruled only for a moment.

Sin is within us, aiming at dominion. This knowledge, together with the fact that we are nevertheless alive to God, should:

• Help our peace, for we perceive that men may be truly the Lord's, even though sin struggles within them.
• Aid our caution, for our divine life is well worth preserving and needs to be guarded with constant care.
• Draw us to use the means of grace, since in these the Lord meets with us and refreshes our new life.

Let us come to the Table of Communion, and to all other ordinances, as alive to God. In that manner, let us feed on Christ.

Adapted from Charles Spurgeon's sermon notes.

Gospel-Centered Discipleship

In this book, Jonathan Dodson calls us to fight the good fight of faith in the strength of the gospel. Read a free chapter and get the book here.

He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. - Hanna Rosin

There has been significant attention in the media recently about changing roles between men and women; most notably in The Atlantic, Slate, and The New York Times (Interestingly each written by women). One of the major themes in this trend is the rise of two things: The Omega Male and women who don't need them.

The entire article in The Atlantic is worth a read, but a few paragraphs are especially insightful:

"As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”

"American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man [Emphasis mine]. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”

"At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.”

Here's the thing; you might be this guy. You might know one, or ten, of these guys. The Omega Male is not a rare phenomenon, which is why we need to be familiar with it and them.

The Complications of Roles

This is clearly a loaded subject; packed with a slew of issues like the following:

• Sociological: the well-documented prolonging of adolescence into emerging adulthood.
• Philosophical: according to the New York Times article, questions of self-understanding.
• Pop-Cultural: as the references in each article to movie and TV characters illustrate, the media that helped to create this phenomenon is selling it back to us and perpetuating it. I could've sworn there was a line in Fight Club about this.
• Economic: are cultures without America's vast economic luxury facing the same cultural issues? Are Belize, Rwanda, or Ecuador struggling with the same confusions?

The end result of all of it is wide-spread confusion over the roles of men and women, love and sex, relationship and friendship.

The Omega Male and the Church

What none of these articles have touched on is how this has invaded and effected the church.  Like any other social entity, the church tends to overemphasize certain things to the detriment of others. Beneath the din of culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage, we have to ask if the church has been faithful in teaching young people about proper roles for men and women. In the large segments of the church that clumsily "embraced the arts" in the last 7 years, did they spend as much time teaching those same artists what the Bible teaches about what a man is, what a woman is, and how they should interact in friendships and relationships?

The Omega Male and the gender role confusion associated with them are only recently being popularly analyzed and diagnosed, but by the time issues reach a popular level they are already ubiquitous. This would make it a good time for the church to ask how it can teach Omega Males to be men; to contend for the faith (Jude 3), to treat girls as sisters (1 Tim. 5:2), and to work hard like a farmer, sharing in suffering, competing by the rules like an athlete (2 Tim. 2:1-6)—all activities that Omegas aren't prone to do but about which the Bible is clear.

For further thought-provoking commentary on men, women, & relationships, I strongly suggest this video.

Know Your Heretics series: Click | View Series

The Rise of the Judaizers

A problem arose in the early church when the apostles took the gospel of Jesus to Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles. When Gentiles responded to the gospel, a conflict arose that threatened to divide the church.

A group called the Judaizers opposed Paul and Barnabas at the Council of Jerusalem (AD 50) in Acts 15. They were uncertain that the benefits of the covenant people of God were to be extended to the Gentiles, thus doubting their conversion by the gospel.

Paul's response assures them that the Gentiles had indeed been made partakers in the blessings of the covenant, namely, the Holy Spirit: "And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith" (Acts 15:8-9).

The Judaizers' View of Salvation

The Judaizers were teaching that God still required everyone to observe certain rituals and statutes in order to be accepted by him as Father.

Paul, in recounting his confrontation of Peter before the Judaizers, gives us an insight into the teaching of this group (Gal. 2:14). Apparently, the Judaizers were attempting to force Gentile Christians to live under the regulations of the Mosaic Law.

They are also called the "circumcision party" (Gal. 2:12), because one of the specific elements of the Law that the Judaizers were forcing the Gentile Christians to live by was the practice of circumcision.

Peter had withdrawn himself from eating with Gentile Christians, fearing the opposition that would come from the Judaizers. Eating with Gentiles would have rendered Peter ceremonially unclean under the Old Covenant, by breaking an important element of the Mosaic Law. However, Paul said Peter's conduct was "not in step with the truth of the gospel" (Gal. 2:14).

The Orthodox Response

Paul's response is given in Galatians 2:16: "We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified."

Paul's other response is found in Galatians 5:12: "I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves!" He suggests self-castration for those who require circumcision for others. Paul made his point clearly.

According to Paul and the response drafted at the Council of Jerusalem, the Gentiles were not obligated to follow the restrictions of the Law. They were free in Christ, who had fulfilled the demands of the Law. Paul exhorted the Gentiles to abstain from practices associated with pagan idol worship, not to earn their salvation, but as a response to the life-changing message of the gospel and in gratitude for God's gift of salvation.

Why Does All This Matter?

While the heresy of the Judaizers was put to rest by the Apostle Paul, the idea behind their erroneous belief still permeates the church today. The issues are no longer circumcision or ceremonial uncleanness, but the question of how the law relates to salvation—or how works relate to righteousness—is still something that many Christians remain confused about today.

Paul's exhortation to the Judaizers remains as important as ever. It is not by works that we are saved, but solely by the grace of Christ. In fact, to add anything to the work of Christ for salvation actually negates God's grace. Paul says, "I do not nullify the grace of God, for if justification were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose" (Gal. 2:21).

Preaching & the Emerging Church

This ebook offers a thorough critique and evaluation of the preaching of four leaders of the emerging church movement. Get it here.

Click through to the Resurgence if you can't see the video.

I recently sat down with Matt Chandler, Pastor of The Village Church (A29) at the recent Acts 29 Retreat in Vail, Colorado. Matt shares some insights from what he has learned through his experience with cancer and how to lead yourself and your church through suffering.

For more from Dustin Neeley, check out his blog Church Planting for the Rest of Us.

Acts 29 Network

A network of churches planting churches for the glory of Jesus. Get more info.

We have all likely heard of the public ministry of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. However, his private ministry in his home may be even more compelling as he gives a profound example of what it means to pastor your first church body—your family.

Spurgeon says:

“If we want to bring up a godly family, who shall be a seed to serve God when our heads are under the clods of the valley, let us seek to train them up in the fear of God by meeting together as a family for worship.”

Susannah, his wife, describes the nightly scene at their house:

“After the meal was over, an adjournment was made to the study for family worship, and it was at these seasons that my beloved’s prayers were remarkable for their tender childlikeness, their spiritual pathos and their intense devotion. He seemed to come as near to God as a little child to a loving father, and we were often moved to tears as he talked thus face to face with his Lord.”

A visitor tells of his evening in the Spurgeon home:

One of the most helpful hours of my visits to Westwood was the hour of family prayer. At six o’clock all the household gathered into the study for worship. Usually Mr. Spurgeon would himself lead the devotions. The portion read was invariably accompanied with exposition. How amazingly helpful those homely and gracious comments were. I remember, especially, his reading of the twenty-fourth of Luke: “Jesus Himself drew near and went with them.” How sweetly he talked upon having Jesus with us wherever we go. Not only to have Him draw near at special seasons but to go with us whatever labour we undertake...

...Then, how full of tender pleading, of serene confidence in God, of world-embracing sympathy were his prayers... His public prayers were an inspiration and benediction, but his prayers with the family were to me more wonderful still... Mr. Spurgeon, when bowed before God in family prayer, appeared a grander man even than when holding thousands spellbound by his oratory.

Spurgeon, despite a schedule that would crush most and physical ailments that would cause the rest us to tap out, maintained this time with family regardless of his circumstances or company. It was his great joy to do so. May it be the same with us.

Sources and Further Reading:

• Family Worship: In the Bible, in History & in Your Home by Donald S. Whitney
• C.H. Spurgeon’s Autobiography by C.H. Spurgeon, Susannah Spurgeon, and J. W. Harrald.
• Spurgeon: A New Biography by Arnold Dallimore

For a great resource to help you lead your family in worship, check out the Rizers—fun, original music that helps kids memorize Scripture. Listen to the Rizers here.

The Rizers

A band that sings Scripture verses in the form of upbeat, kid-friendly music. Check out The Rizers.

Click through to the Resurgence if you can't see the video.

Pastor Mark recently got a chance to sit down with Randy Alcorn, director of Eternal Perspective Ministries and author of numerous bestselling books, including The Treasure Principle and Heaven.

In this clip from the interview, he explains why in spite of having sold millions of books, he only makes minimum wage.

There are 7 more clips in this interview that we will be posting over the next month or two. Feel free to bookmark the Resurgence, grab our feed, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook for more.

Religion Saves

Pastor Mark answers the top nine most-asked questions in Religion Saves: And Nine Other Misconceptions. Find out more.

Word and Spirit series: Click | View Series

The Ability to Obey

Obedience is the continuing testimony of the power of God. The illumination that produces regeneration and sanctification also produces obedience. Erickson notes that new birth produces “a new sensitivity to spiritual things, a new direction of life, and an increasing ability to obey God” (Christian Theology).

Luther understood that saving faith comes by the Holy Spirit working through the preached Word and becomes efficacious after the Holy Spirit works on the heart of the hearer. “Where the Word is, the Spirit inevitably follows” (Evangelical Dictionary of Theology). The Holy Spirit reveals with the Word and not apart from it and the subsequent result is empowered obedience. Hoekema observes the Holy Spirit’s work that “enables the hearer of the gospel call to respond to his summons with repentance faith, and obedience” (Saved by Grace).

An Expression of Redemption

The Holy Spirit illumines the understanding of Scripture. The obedience that follows is both in careful study of the Word, speech, and action. The obedience to Scripture, therefore, is an expression of redemption. Redemption is accomplished by Christ and applied to the believer by the Holy Spirit as testified in Scripture. John Frame has reportedly stated, “Scripture is only completely understood when obeyed.”

Illumination and empowered obedience are inseparable and are joined in the Holy Spirit’s work of regeneration. New life and forgiveness are followed by fruit that gives evidence of the Word as God’s people are strengthened to obey.

Scripture Wallpapers

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Dead But Alive: Click | View Series

Romans 6:11-12—"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions."

How intimately the believer's duties are interwoven with his privileges! Because he is alive to God, he is to renounce sin, since that corrupt thing belongs to his estate of death.

How intimately both his duties and his privileges are bound up with Christ Jesus his Lord!

How thoughtful ought we to be upon these matters; reckoning what is right and fit; and carrying out that reckoning to its practical issues.

What Does It Mean To Be Dead to Sin?

"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus."

1. We are dead with Christ to sin by having borne the punishment in him. In Christ we have endured the death penalty, and are regarded as dead by the law (verses 6 and 7).
2. We are risen with him into a justified condition, and have reached a new life (verse 8).
3. We can no more come under sin again than he can (verse 9).
4. We are therefore forever dead to its guilt and reigning power: "Sin will have no dominion over you" (verses 12-14).

This reckoning is based on truth, or we should not be exhorted to it.

To reckon yourself to be dead to sin, so that you boast that you do not sin at all, would be a reckoning based on falsehood, and would be exceedingly mischievous. "For there is no one who does not sin" (1 Kings 8:46; 1 John 1:8). None are so provoking to God, as sinners who boast their own fancied perfection.

The reckoning that we do not sin, must either go upon the Antinomian theory, that sin in the believer is no sin, which is a shocking notion, or else our conscience must tell us that we do sin in many ways; in omission or commission, in transgression or shortcoming, in temper or in spirit (James 3:2, Eccles. 7:20, Rom. 3:23).

To reckon yourself dead to sin in the spiritual sense is full of benefit both to heart and life. Be a ready reckoner in this fashion.

Adapted from Charles Spurgeon's sermon notes.

Free Posters

Download free posters explaining key theological ideas like Expiation, the Incarnation, and the sinlessness of Jesus. Get the posters here.

Better is a little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble with it.
- Proverbs 15:16