The Grace Discipleship Group

Jeff Vanderstelt answers the question:

“How do you train your people to share the gospel?”

1. Confidence in the gospel is primary. If your people haven’t understood the gospel and its power personally, specifically and currently, they cannot have confidence to share it. Look for places where the gospel has not come to bear in your peoples’ lives.

a. Past Tense Gospel: Justification. Do your people struggle with guilt and shame? Do they truly understand their justification?

b. Present Tense Gospel: Sanctification. Do your people struggle with living victoriously on a daily basis? Do they understand the power of the gospel for today?

c. Future Tense Gospel: Glorification. Are your people living in many fears and afraid of the future or ‘unknown’? Do they understand God’s promise and security of a glorious end?

2. Develop your people in a biblical theology – to know the story of the Bible and how it all points to Jesus.

a. If your people can learn to tell the story of the Bible orally, they’ll be able to share it with others.

b. Teach your people how to identify Jesus as the main point of each of the smaller stories in the Bible, they will learn how to contextualize the gospel in their current situations and stories.

c. Teach your people the basic gospel story-line: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. Help them to understand their own smaller story in this vein – to identify their own false gospels and see how the true gospel of Jesus is the real answer.

3. Teach others to declare the gospel through the sacrament of Communion.

a. Every Sunday, your members should be reminding each other of the gospel at Communion.

b. Practice with one another as believers, and grow in competence to share the gospel with those who don’t understand or believe in Jesus at all.

Jeff Vanderstelt: “Your people have to have confidence in the gospel. Otherwise, they won’t share it. If they don’t believe it’s the power of God to save because they haven’t experienced it changing them, they’re not going to talk about that.”

Since my birthday is coming up once again, and as I prepare to make another trip around the sun, Lord willing, it is a good time to reflect on things.  A birthday or the beginning of a new year is an ideal time to stop, look up, and get our bearings. To that end, here are some questions to ask prayerfully in the presence of God.  These questions are borrowed from Don Whitney.

1. What’s one thing you could do this year to increase your enjoyment of God?

2. What’s the most humanly impossible thing you will ask God to do this year?

3. What’s the single most important thing you could do to improve the quality of your family life this year?

4. In which spiritual discipline do you most want to make progress this year, and what will you do about it?

5. What is the single biggest time-waster in your life, and what will you do about it this year?

6. What is the most helpful new way you could strengthen your church?

7. For whose salvation will you pray most fervently this year?

8. What’s the most important way you will, by God’s grace, try to make this year different from last year?

9. What one thing could you do to improve your prayer life this year?

10. What single thing that you plan to do this year will matter most in ten years? In eternity?

Fellow Acts 29 church-planter, Ray Ortland, has written this brief post about breathing life into your spouse. Continue Reading »

Tim Keller has written an amazing and helpful post on the topic of handling criticism.  I read it with great benefit to myself and have posted it below in hope that you too might profit: Continue Reading »

My time listening to God this morning took me through the latter part of Isaiah.  At the end of the 16th verse of the 48th chapter, He says, “And now the Lord God has sent me, and his Spirit.”  The “me” within this context is the Servant of the Lord - the Servant whose mouth is a sharp sword (49:2) - the Servant who is a light for the nations (49:6) - the Servant who is given as a covenant to the people (49:8) - the Servant who sets the prisoners free (49:9) - that same suffering Servant who is ch. 52-53 who is despised and rejected by men - wounded for our transgressions.

The triune God is our Savior!  Before the new things came to pass God announced them to us (48:5) - and then in time He did it.  The Lord God sent His only begotten Son to redeem us and His Holy Spirit to regenerate us that we might behold such a Savior and cast ourselves upon Him in repentant faith.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,

Murray

For those of you with young children.  Here is a series of messages that you might find very helpful from a conference at Mars Hill Church with Tedd Tripp.

Biblical Parenting Conference

Mark Dever had a Q & A session at Boyce College recently.

Advice to first year college students: “You need to realize you’re arrogant. Not because you’re a first year student but because you’re a human being who’s fallen. Even if you’re redeemed you’re still fallen. Ok? You’re not glorified yet. Got that straight? That’s important. Now, you need to realize that that means you need people and that doesn’t mean just your friends here. Right? Even the Gentile Pagans have friends. No, you need to be in a local church that’s healthy and it preaches the Word. The church is far more important than any school you will ever go to. So you need to get in a local church, join it, officially be a member, put yourself under the authority of the elders in that church. They will watch over your soul as men who must give an account to God, Hebrews chapter 13.”

Advice to last year college students: “You are arrogant… Not because you’re in your final year but because you’re a fallen child of Adam. Even if you are redeemed, you’re still fallen. Alright? You know you’re not in glory yet. You’re not glorified. So you need to be in a local church. You need to be in a healthy local church. You are making life decisions that you are not competent, you are not made by yourself to make. You’re meant to be in a community of faith where your character is known, your gifts are understood, where they can give you good counsel and direction so get in a local healthy church. Spend this final year in school in a healthy local church as an official member of there.”

This is a good review by Dick Kaufman on what a missional church looks like.  Use it to reflect on your own life, the life of your missional community, and the life of your church.

Continue Reading »

Jeff Vandersteldt of Soma makes the following observations: Continue Reading »

This quote from Lesslie Newbigin’s book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society on pgs. 232-233, is a great challenge for local churches who can have a tendency to have an introverted concern for their own life, and neglect their very purpose.

Continue Reading »