John Stott on Comfortable Christianity

Kirk E. Miller

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.”

Greg Gilbert, What is the Gospel? (Study Guide)

Kirk E. Miller

GilbertGospelThe following is a study guide I composed in ministry at South City Church for Greg Gilbert’s What is the Gospel?

Download Study Guide for What is the Gospel? by Greg Gilbert.

Greg Gilbert, What is the Gospel? – Surveys the basics of the Gospel—the good news about how we can be saved due to what Jesus has done through his cross and resurrection; valuable for both outreach as well as gaining personal clarity on the gospel. We recommend at least working through chapters 2-5.

Missional Submission (1 Peter 3:1-7)

Kirk E. Miller

Missional Submission (1 Peter 3:1-7)
South City Church
June 11, 2017

Podcast link.

See all sermons from this series on 1 Peter.

The ‘Priesthood of All Believers’ for Work

Kirk E. Miller

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:

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