There is no condemnation in Osteen’s message for failing to fulfill God’s righteous law. On the other hand, there is no justification. Instead of either message, there is an upbeat moralism that is somewhere in the middle: Do your best, follow the instructions I give you, and God will make your life successful. “Don’t sit back passively,” he warns, but with a gentle pleading suggests that the only reason we need to follow his advice is because it’s useful for getting what we want. God is a buddy or partner who exists primarily to make sure we are happy. “You do your part, and God will do his part.” “Sure we have our faults,” he says, but “the good news is, God loves us anyway.” Instead of accepting God’s just verdict on our own righteousness and fleeing to Christ for justification, Osteen counsels readers simply to reject guilt and condemnation. Yet it is hard to do that successfully when God’s favor and blessing on my life depend entirely on how well I can put his commands to work. “If you will simply obey his commands, He will change things in your favor.” That’s all: “…simply obey his commands.”
and
As the New Testament repeatedly affirms, those who want to be saved by their own obedience need to know that God doesn’t grade on a curve. His record-keeping is bad news, not good news, unless Christ’s obedient record has been credited to us through faith alone. God’s law says, “If you want to be saved by your own effort, here are the terms: Do all these things and you’ll go to heaven; fail to do them and you’ll go to hell.” The revivalists of yesteryear came up with their own list, but it was basically the same threat: “Do or die.” The kinder, gentler version is, “Try harder and you’ll be happier; fail to do them and you’ll lose out on God’s best for your life here and now.” No heaven, no hell; no condemnation or salvation; no perfect obedience of Christ credited to us: Just do your best. Remember, God is keeping score! Christ becomes totally unnecessary in this message.
Osteen reflects the broader assumption among evangelicals that we are saved by making a decision to have a personal relationship with God. If one’s greatest problem is loneliness, the good news is that Jesus is a reliable friend. If the big problem is anxiety, Jesus will calm us down. Jesus is the glue that holds our marriages and families together, gives us purpose for us to strive toward, wisdom for daily life. And there are half-truths in all of these pleas, but they never really bring hearers face to face with their real problem: that they stand naked and ashamed before a holy God and can only be acceptably clothed in his presence by being clothed, head to toe, in Christ’s righteousness.
This gospel of “submission,” “commitment,” “decision,” and “having a personal relationship with God” fails to realize, first of all, that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified co-heir with Christ and adopted child of the Father. “How can I be right with God?” is no longer a question when my happiness rather than God’s holiness is the main issue. My concern is that Joel Osteen is simply the latest in a long line of self-help evangelists who appeal to the native American obsession with pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Salvation is not a matter of divine rescue from the judgment that is coming on the world, but a matter of self-improvement in order to have your best life now.
“Across all decision-making realms, it tilts to the woman,” noted Rich Morin, the Pew study’s lead author. “I was surprised by the percentage of men who made none of the decisions in any of the areas. A significant percentage were just bystanders.” Not surprisingly, one reason men say they are willing to acquiesce in their spouses’ wishes is that their wives usually have greater knowledge of the day-to-day activities and needs of the home than they do. They trust their wives’ choices the way they would any specialist’s. But what is rather unexpected is the deeper (and much sweeter) reason men have for giving in to their wives: They want them to be happy, or at least they don’t want to be responsible for making them unhappy.
The general consensus of sociologists is that, whereas a woman’s marital satisfaction is dependent on a combination of economic, emotional and psychological realities, a man’s marital satisfaction is most determined by one factor: how happy his wife is. When she is happy, he is. Working within this framework, most husbands are unwilling to dig in their heels on any issue unless they have a tremendous incentive to do so.
Now here’s my point: both the RCC and the EO have captured the Spirit in the Church so that Church too often has become Authority. One example, hardly foolproof, illustrates my point: RCCs and EOs talk about Church; Protestants talk about Scripture. It is their emphasis that I like — and I wish each talked more of Spirit.
Announcing the launch of a new website designed to help ministers, ministerial students, and Bible students everywhere. BestCommentaries.com polls the most referenced commentary lists (and throws my own list in for good measure) and provides rankings and reviews. If you know John Dyer, give him a virtual pat on the back for providing a truly useful site for those who love good commentaries. Thanks, John.
If you’ve never heard S. M. Lockridge preach the “My King” (also known as the “Do You Know Him”) sermon, you owe it to yourself to visit this site where you can download or listen to an mp3. You can also watch a video slide show with the straight audio (w/o background music other sites add). Enjoy - and Praise God.
“If Peter and Paul were here, they would scold you because you wish right off to be as accomplished as they. Crawling is something, even if one is unable to walk. Do your best. If you cannot preach an hour, then preach half an hour or a quarter of an hour. Do not try to imitate other people. Center on the shortest and simplest points, which are the very heart of the matter, and leave the rest to God. Look solely to his honor and not to applause. Pray that God will give you a mouth and to your audience ears.
I can tell you preaching is not a work of man. Although I am old [he was forty-eight] and experienced, I am afraid every time I have to preach. You will most certainly find out three things: first, you will have prepared your sermon as diligently as you know how, and it will slip through your fingers like water; second, you may abandon your outline and God will give you grace. You will preach your very best. The audience will be pleased, but you won’t. And thirdly, when you have been unable in advance to pull anything together, you will preach acceptably both to your hearers and to yourself. So pray to God and leave all the rest to Him.”
(Here I Stand, Bainton, 273-274)
Even in my short time as a preacher, I have had all these experiences. God gives the grace, to him be the glory.
The increasingly famous Tim Challies has added “commentaries” to his long list of book reviews and recommendations. I’ve often been impressed with what seems to be his desire to help his readers pursue spiritual formation (rather than simply pontificating). That said, he falls into the traps that most commentary list makers do not take the time to avoid. I offer the following critique for future aspiring commentary list creators.
1) What is the criteria for the list?
Challies give us two commentaries for each book of the NT. How did he decide? What makes a good commentary in his opinion? He does warn readers to choose commentaries “appropriate to your education and expertise.” What is the education and expertise of Mr. Challies? How can I know if my requirements for a commentary match his requirements for a commentary so that I can have any confidence that his recommendation will mean anything at all to me? Why does the NICNT “appear to be the best complete New Testament set”? What sets it apart?
Is this list anything more than “stuff I like”? Tell us why - the readers need to know how you are choosing volumes so that they can gauge how appropriate your selections are to their situation.
2) What makes any of these particular selections worthwhile?
This is related to (1), but what I am referring to here is the lack of any annotation for each recommendation. Whereas (1) is a critique of the lack of selection criteria, (2) is a critique of the lack of its application. Why is Fee better than Garland for 1 Corinthians? Is it because of Fee’s commitment to a charismatic interpretation? Does Challies like Fee’s proposed construction of the early Corinthian church? Why would a volume from 1987 be a better choice than the survey style BECNT from 2003?
3) Who would actually be helped by these recommendations?
Challies takes a few positive steps toward answering this question. He does warn readers to be aware that not all commentaries are equally useful for everybody. He also acknowledges that he is a non-scholar who enjoys studying God’s word.
However, the lack of any additional qualifications leads us to this basic understanding of these recommendations’ usability - “A list for people who like to study the Bible.” While admirable, this doesn’t really narrow the field down much. Will Bible study leaders or Sunday school teachers like this list more than non-teachers? Does it matter if you have a college background or not? Is this a list for people who just like to know a bunch of facts or do its members genuinely help readers in translating biblical principles to practical godly living? Tell us who the list was created to help: pastors, educated laypeople, the “everyman” - who? By not guiding his readers to understand the intended audience, Challies leaves his readers with little more than a few clues for better guesses - and I expect his intention was to help more than that.
4) What was the extent of the comparison?
Though usually my primary critique of a commentary list is (1), this “extent question” looms large over Challies list. He refers to his “attempt at thorough research” and his “extensive research,” but nowhere details what that research included beyond references to a few online commentary recommendation lists. Did he only look at commentaries reviewed by these sources? Or perhaps only those that appeared on two or more of the lists? If we do not really know anything about the extent of the “extensive research” then how can we have any confidence that these recommendations are actually the best recommendations for any particular biblical book?
Further, the striking admission that Challies was “relying almost entirely on secondary sources” suggests that he has no practical knowledge of the volumes he is recommending. Readers are left with the impression that all he did was uncritically compare a few relatively random lists and make guesses as to what books would probably be good purchases, maybe.
Conclusion
I applaud anyone’s desire to help others not waste money on books, especially commentaries. There are lots of intelligent, informed, discerning people on the web making recommendations (Challies may very well be one) - but if they do not give us any basis for their advice, then they are simply adding their voice to the “because I said so” cloud of the internet. Such is useful as far as it goes, but most people who desire to make wise commentary purchases would be so much better served by list creators simply answering for their readers the questions detailed above.
All children need a laptop. Not a computer, but a human laptop. Moms, Dads, Grannies and Grandpas, Aunts, Uncles – someone to hold them, read to them, teach them. Loved ones who will embrace them and pass on the experience, rituals and knowledge of a hundred previous generations. Loved ones who will pass to the next generation their expectations of them, their hopes, and their dreams.
– General Colin L. Powell Founder, America’s Promise – the Alliance for Youth.
There are facts that matter here. Facts about history, doctrine and courtesy. Facts matter when you are covering religion news and trends. Facts matter when you are interviewing religious people — left and right, members of major world religions and members of lesser known bodies that some would be tempted to call “fringe.” Facts and doctrine matter to religious people, even to people who are very specific and highly creedal about the doctrines that they reject. I have interviewed many an atheist who had more doctrines in his anti-creed than I recite in the Nicene Creed.
This isn’t about emotions and feelings. It’s about getting the facts right and showing respect for the people for whom those facts, doctrines and rituals are a matter of eternal life and death. Facts matter in journalism, religion and journalism about religion. Amen.
We duped ourselves when as evangelicals we thought we could force reform of behaviors and attitudes as a way to steer the Church back to God. I’m a full on conservative, but I believe what happened was that we told the churches that just by adopting a line of “conservative” thinking that it would result in spiritual transformation. We duped ourselves there. It’s just a substitute for real discipleship. Look, I’ve been a leader in the church world for over 18 years now, and while that is not a lot of time in comparison to others ahead of me, it does at least give me a track record of time to observe the fact that what evangelical churches are calling “discipleship” is really behavior modification.
He is first to claim that he does not have all the answers, but he does have a few spot-on insights.
I am not impressed by the amount LifeWay “gives back” to the Cooperative Program. My church budget is dwindling through increasingly higher priced materials that are increasingly not applicable to my small church situation. Don’t get me started on the insane shipping and handling fee structure. LifeWay privileges large churches with multiple specialized ministries that can be planned far in advance. I am starting to understand the voices at the last few convention meetings calling for an increased focus and applicability for the small churches.
Rather than LifeWay the For-Profit Megalith donating a few extra dollars to the missions fund, I’d like to see LifeWay the SBC Agency Denominational Publishing House serve the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention by helping churches like mine perform local missions with high-value low-cost outreach and education materials.
It is getting to the point from a cost/benefits perspective where it no longer makes sense to support LifeWay. It is now worth my time to shop around for the best curriculum and best materials for the best price. Problem is, I have generations of people trained to privilege LifeWay out of denominational loyalty. Now, if I want to make changes, I’ve got to train and educate my congregation on why LifeWay no longer delivers value for our stewardship dollars. This puts me into the position of encouraging Cooperative Program style denominational commitment while denigrating an associated agency. I do not have a full complement of lifetime Southern Baptists - our folks come from all over - and this mixed message creates confusion and lowers overall enthusiasm.
I thought there was supposed to be this big LifeWay revolution under Rainer. But the website is still hard to search and navigate, the prices are still high, the kitch is still strong, and the curriculum still draws complaints of biblical insufficiency and non-applicability from my teachers. Perhaps it takes longer than I think to resolve some of this. If so, it would be nice to see some Baptist Press about what is actually going on in Nashville that might give some of us out on the frontier some hope. When the president “co-writes” a book called Simple Church, you might expect his organization to be slightly less byzantine and quite a bit more responsive to the many small congregations whose money it takes and whose denominational name it carries.
Jordan Buckley shares some thoughts after reading John F. Haught’s latest offering in The Christian Century:
Nietzsche, along with Camus and Sartre, recognized the huge implications of atheism, and they believed it would take incredible courage to face up to the bleak reality of such a universe in which there is no meaning above ourselves. In contrast to this “muscular” atheism, Haught points out that the new atheists want to remove God and religion from society, but keep everything else, including a basically traditional Christian system of right and wrong. They simply haven’t bothered to face the implications of their ideas. They think that they can blithely rid themselves of the nuisance of a God who deserves to be worshiped, but they are denying the Person who upholds their entire universe. Only by the grace and mercy of God does Christopher Hitchens or any one of us breathe a single breath. In him we live and move and have our being.
We most often think of the ancient world as a completely barbaric place - strictly speaking, it was of course - what with the freedom with which the Romans labeled everyone else, but that is beside the point here. People were not different people back then. They were the same types of people we have now, just in a different cultural and technological situation. It does not surprise me that the ancients had many “advanced” activities, constrained only by their relative technology.
“Interestingly the Roman author Celsus described cataract extraction surgery using a specially pointed needle - and possible cataract needles (specilla) have been found in Britain as well as elsewhere in the Roman Empire.”
If you are one of those people who stay up at night stressing over what exactly the apostle Paul’s thorn in the side was, perhaps now you can rule out cataracts, since there was apparently a remedy for that. Just trying to be helpful…
