Serious Church: Taking the Christian Life Seriously through the Church’s Practice of Discipline (Matthew 18:15-20; 1 Corinthians 5:1-13)
South City Church
July 9, 2017
This sermon is a part of a series on the foundational principles of South City Church’s philosophy of ministry. See all content from this series.
I … say Amen to relationships…. [But] I must admit I’m growing skeptical of the only — organic — witness. … I wonder how much we actually get to the Good News. … People are not saved by relationships but by the Gospel. So it’d be fair to ask- have I shared the Gospel…? Proclamation and relationship can’t be separated but relationships can’t [be allowed to] lull us to sleep making us think we’re evangelists without ever sharing the good news.
~ David Michael Doran Jr., church-planting pastor at Resurrection Church (Lincoln Park, MI)
It is clear you don’t like my way of doing evangelism. You raise some good points. Frankly, I sometimes do not like my way of doing evangelism. But I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.
~ D.L. Moody (said to one of his critics)
The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict, half-built towers [Luke 14:25-30] — the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so-called ‘nominal Christianity.’ In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved; enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience.
~ John Stott (Basic Christianity)
If our Christianity does not make us uncomfortable, if it does not disrupt or disturb us, if it leaves us where we are, then I’m afraid our Christianity is not Christ’s Christianity. We’ve fashioned a Jesus after our own image. And any Jesus, other than the Biblical Jesus, is not the saving Jesus.
“Take up your cross,” he said, i.e., “Following me means dying to yourself.”
Missional Submission (1 Peter 3:1-7)
South City Church
June 11, 2017
See all sermons from this series on 1 Peter.
I composed the following as a devotional for some of my Christian coworkers at work.
For those of us who are Protestant, we will likely be celebrating the 500 year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation this coming fall.
In light of that, as we think of our Christian calling in relation to our work, it’s more than fitting to recount the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.
Christian historical philosopher Alister McGrath explains in the following:
“From the outset, Protestantism rejected the critical medieval distinction between the ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ orders. While this position can easily be interpreted as a claim for the desacralization of the sacred, it can equally well be understood as a claim for the sacralization of the secular. As early as 1520, Luther had laid the fundamental conceptual foundations for created sacred space within the secular. His doctrine of the ‘priesthood of all believers’ asserted that there is no genuine difference of status between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘temporal’ order. All Christians are called to be priests – and can exercise that calling within the everyday world. The idea of ‘calling’ was fundamentally redefined: no longer was it about being called to serve God by leaving the world; it was now about serving God in the world.”
The spearhead of recovering this Biblical theology was Protestant reformer Martin Luther:
Kirk E. Miller 