toddjohnston.org

So, occasionally I get a funny spam email in my gmail account. This happens to be one of those emails:

Dear Sir / Madam,

It is our pleasure to inform you that your email address won on the 3rd
category $521,000.00 on the global lottery instituted by president Obama
Barak which took place in Houston Texas on the 4th of March, 2009. As
part of his economic reforms and unification into global family to bring
peace to our world and ensure good opportunities.

To apply for your prize payment, you are required to contact Lottery
Commission via below email contact with your given file numbers
(001/TX7/OL0982).
Include your names, country and mobile telephone number:

Lottery Commission,
1919 N Loop W, Houston, TX 77008,
Email; w_602@live.fr
Contact: T. Jordan.
Payment Auditor.

Take note: to avoid any mistake, copy the above contact email, paste it in
your browser, write out your informations and send. Or Just click reply to
this email and write your informations and send.

Congratulations once more.

Yours Faithfully,

Mrs. Wilse D Apetia -
Online Co-coordinator -

So, there really is some spammer out there who thinks this stuff works, but videos like this make me take pause and think again. Maybe some people really do buy into it.

“Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”

- Timothy Keller

I have a very short theory on why this is the case, namely paid church staff . . . career Christians. Their very existence and livelihood depends on the “conservative, button-down, moralistic people” paying the bills. So, church ends up looking like THOSE people. It’s just smart to run your country club well if you want your patrons to continue to pay their dues.

It’s been somewhat of a bummer to have an iPhone 3G with no 3G service since July. I’m happy to say that AT&T has recently installed some 3G towers nearby, giving me nice 3G coverage pretty much everywhere of significance around town.

So I just went through the easy process of jailbreaking my iPhone to tether it to my macbook pro via pdaNet to test the speed of the local network. It works like a charm.

Almost 2mb downspeed and 285 kb/s up speed. Pretty nice indeed! I’m sure sprint users are still waiting for evdo towers to be installed up here and I’m glad I’m no longer one of them. Thanks AT&T.

I might post instructions for setting up tethering on a mac later on. If you can use google, you should be able to find instructions yourself.

It has been quite some time since I’ve posted anything. The time I’ve spent away from blogging has been very good for me. In general, the past several months have been very good for me. It has been a sort of wandering in the wilderness.

Wandering isn’t easy. When the Israelites left Egypt, they were leaving their enslavement behind, so they thought. I think they thought if they could just get out from under the “yolk” of the Egyptians, they would finally be free to live as a Godly people. The problem was that when they left enslavement, they retained their slave mentality. While God made it easy for them to shrug off their oppressors, they were still enslaved to a cultural upbringing that pointed them everywhere else but to God. All of the signs and wonders performed by God and through Moses didn’t make a dent in their fallen understanding of spiritual reality. Only after all of the generation that worshiped the calf at Sinai had wandered in the desert for 40 years and died were the Israelites free to pursue the land promised to Abraham. Even Moses only got to see the promised land from afar because he struck the rock instead speaking to it as God commanded.

I’ve spent the past several months wrestling in the wilderness. I moved to Rome, GA about 7 months ago now. And it might as well be the wilderness. I’ve spent most of my time here in the confines of my house and home office, rarely speaking to a soul other than my lovely wife. Don’t get me wrong, I have gotten out a good bit, hanging with some life-long friends of mine, and with my business partner. But, mostly it has been been a solitary existence. It has been a wandering time with little direction and much struggling.

We are all fallen, no doubt, but even when we’re freed from the oppression of our sinfulness through Christ, we still live with a sinful slave mentality that points us everywhere but to Christ as our daily, moment-to-moment salvation. I have had plenty of struggles over the past several months, but a slave mentality has been my foe.

But as Paul put it, we are no longer slaves to sin, we are slaves to righteousness (Romans 6:17-18 ESV). Although as Christians, we’ll always have the foe of our flesh with us as long as we live, we can cling to the daily truth and hope that we “have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.” (Rom. 6:22 ESV)

I also recently found a great devotional book that has been and continues to be a great help to me. It’s called Whiter Than Snow, by Paul David Tripp. I’m usually not a huge fan of devotionals, because they’re usually a bit too contrived and simplistic. But this book is amazing because it takes you through Psalm 51 (ESV) and David’s struggles for 52 days. Every day is a call to examine your life, see David’s story of sin, repentance, and grace as your own story, allowing you to let go of whatever righteousness you bring with you before God and instead cling to Christ’s righteousness. If you ever have trouble getting into the Word as I have, definitely check this book out. If you’re a super Christian and spend time in the word every day, check it out anyways. It’s meant to go through one devotional a week for a year (but you can probably just go through it how ever you want to like I have been doing).

Because I come from a Christian background where salvation is limited to the notion of a simple one-time prayer, or a decision made when you walk down front, or raise your hand to agree with the speaker’s summation of the Gospel, it can be quite easy for me to lose site of the real meaning of the Gospel. The Gospel is a person, not a moment, or a thing. It is the continual grace bestowed on me through the work done in and through the Person of Christ.

“Salvation is not a detached gift of God in some gracious and miraculous way bestowed upon man. Salvation is Christ, and to experience salvation is to experience Christ. It is not the experience of something, but of someone.

The Bible does not teach that Christ has salvation and dispenses it like a benevolent master giving gifts to his servants who obey him. Christ is our salvation and gives Himself to us as our salvation. He is our life; He is our strength; He is our peace; He is our joy; He is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.”

—George W. Peters, A Biblical Theology of Missions (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972), 65

A long while back I came across a great resource in the “First Importance Blog”, which I have subsribed to through RSS. So every day, I get a great quote (such as the one above) that helps point me to the Gospel right in my email. Make sure to check it out.

Do you go to a church that has designed itself with every thing that you could think of to tickle your imagination on Sunday mornings? What would happen if one day it was just all gone, all the big screens, video clips, cool music, pastor with his “talks” that market Jesus in the most fun and attention grabbing way . . . all vanished and gone? What would be left over? Would you still want to come? What would your faith look like? What do you think would happen to the people that go to the church? Would you read the Bible and have a relationship with God? Would you look at your faith with all the distractions gone and decide that maybe you’re not really a Christian? Would you feel confused about what it is that justifies you in the sight of God? Would you really even have a clue?

“What sort of foundation have we in Christ? Was he the beginning of our salvation in order that its fulfillment might follow from ourselves? Did he only open the way by which we might proceed under our own power? Certainly not.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III. XV.V.)

It seems very much like these sorts of churches make church culture into an essential part of faith, a way by which we in our own power might attain what only Christ has made way and attained for us. In the eyes of these churches, any church that is not innovating in similar ways as them is dead and should just give up, because people cannot and will not accept Christ without all of the “buzz marketing”. God in their eyes is powerless to redeem those who would know Him without us marketing the crap out of Jesus and candy-coating the gospel (if they’re even fortunate enough to understand it).

Piper says it best recently on his blog when described “not as an innovator”.

I heard Collin Hansen say in an interview that John Piper is not an innovator.

I hope I can live up to that tribute. I would like it to be true. I am very happy with the simple role of blowing the boredom out of people’s brains with long-forgotten, old-fashioned, faithful blasts of biblical truth.

So let me try to prove how uncreative I am theologically. Here is C. S. Lewis saying fifty years ago in his Reflections on the Psalms what I have spent most of my adult life trying to say:

The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”. But we shall know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him. (p. 97)

And I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. (p. 95)

If it were possible for a created soul fully (I mean, up to the full measure conceivable in a finite being) to “appreciate,” that is to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme beatitude. (p. 96)

I am a shameless conservative (=conserver) in repeating and embellishing such magnificent biblical insights from the past.

So, if it’s all gone, all taken away, what’s really left over? When you innovate the crap out the Gospel, there’s no Gospel left. The Cross + anything = nothing. What would you be left with?

Personally I’ll stick with having my boredom blown out of my brain “with long-forgotten, old-fashioned, faithful blasts of biblical truth” and leave all of those other pastors’ cool opinions, stories, creative takes on the gospel, and video clips to bore the masses.

A story that blows my mind and a situation that I can’t imagine being in for a few days . . . let alone 38 years. From Piper’s blog:

In his book, Passion, Karl Olsson tells a story of incredible patience among the early French Protestants called Huguenots.

In the late Seventeenth Century in… southern France, a girl named Marie Durant was brought before the authorities, charged with the Huguenot heresy. She was fourteen years old, bright, attractive, marriageable. She was asked to abjure the Huguenot faith. She was not asked to commit an immoral act, to become a criminal, or even to change the day-to-day quality of her behavior. She was only asked to say, “J’abjure.” No more, no less. She did not comply. Together with thirty other Huguenot women she was put into a tower by the sea…. For thirty-eight years she continued…. And instead of the hated word J’abjure she, together with her fellow martyrs, scratched on the wall of the prison tower the single word Resistez, resist!

The word is still seen and gaped at by tourists on the stone wall at Aigues-Mortes…. We do not understand the terrifying simplicity of a religious commitment which asks nothing of time and gets nothing from time. We can understand a religion which enhances time…. but we cannot understand a faith which is not nourished by the temporal hope that tomorrow things will be better. To sit in a prison room with thirty others and to see the day change into night and summer into autumn, to feel the slow systemic changes within one’s flesh: the drying and wrinkling of the skin, the loss of muscle tone, the stiffening of the joints, the slow stupefaction of the senses—to feel all this and still to persevere seems almost idiotic to a generation which has no capacity to wait and to endure. (116-117)

Well Rebecca and I just got home from visiting a church in our new home here in Rome and we are both so excited. The worship wasn’t great, really there wasn’t anything on the surface appealing about the place. No one tried to market the place to us. No one was selling us the church or immediately trying to plug us in. From the view point of many churches I’ve been involved with, this place would sadly be described as a miserable failure.

But they’re not because they seem to get it. It being that the most important thing is the Gospel. Many churches try their best to mold themselves as much as they can to whatever culture they’re attempting to reach. This place, from our first impression seems to get that it’s the other way around . . . that we are to imitate Christ as the body of Christ, we’re not to be showy. The scripture teaches us that there wasn’t any thing visually appealing about Christ, nothing that would attract people to him. The Church as the aroma of Christ is meant to point people to the Gospel, not church culture.

I’m not belittling the necessity of marketing, only the use of marketing as a ploy. If you show up at a church as a lost person and everything you experience there is simply just a show imitating everything the world does and is (even in the purest form you can come up with), then what have you really gained? What is there to experience that is any different from what you experience every day? Sure it may be fun, you might be entertained, and you may enjoy the time spent there, but in the end you haven’t experienced the community of Christ, but the communion of the church imitating culture just to get you to feel comfortable enough to come back again. The use of culture to reach culture should never never never be elevated above the importance of the Word and the Gospel–which have no culture.

This place seems to get the Gospel, they seem to be very missional–planting other churches and partnering to see other nations impacted by the gospel. They taught from the Word, not from opinion or feelings or convenience.

Anyways, I’m very wary of speaking too soon about a place because of past experiences, but so far so good. Looks like we’ll be sticking around. I’ll keep you updated with our experiences there and might even mention the name of the place and give concrete examples of what exactly gives me this “sense” i speak of as time goes by.

I just woke up in the middle of the night and came across a post sharing a couple links from a friend. I read the links and believe that the Church really needs to hear this, so I will share them here as well.

An invitation to the table (part one)

An invitation to the table (part two)

An invitation to the table (part three)

Please read them, some good stuff that we all really should hear.

I really don’t want to have an argument with anyone out there on this subject, frankly because I’ve done that before and it isn’t fun. Often times I’ve found that people on the other end of the discussion aren’t really interested in searching God’s word for biblical life-nourishing truth. Instead they would rather argue and insist on creating “biblical-worldviews” for themselves that prop-up and comfort their western, individualistic, and enlightenment inspired notions of Christianity–something that would make little sense to people such as Paul (who wrote half of the new testament).

Earlier I came across some great resources from one of the greatest BAPTIST pastors of our day on the subject of Calvinism, John Piper. It’s a several part seminar he did for people doubting and/or struggling through the “doctrines of grace” as they are called by some. If you’re interested, please do check out the TULIP seminar.