Some excellent evangelistic diagnostic questions to ponder

From Terry Enn’s post “Evangelistic Attitudes”

• Do I believe my evangelistic efforts are vain?
• Am I willing to suffer to share the gospel?
• Am I willing to continue to be bold with the gospel even if when I suffer?
• Am I confident in the power of the gospel?
• Am I confident in my responsibility to speak the gospel?  And am I more interested in pleasing God with my obedience or pleasing men with my silence?
• Is my confidence in my own words and wisdom or in God’s gospel?
• Am I seeking glory from men?
• Am I compassionate and gracious when I speak the gospel?
• Do I have a fondness and love for those who need to hear the gospel?
• Am I willing to be inconvenienced and am I willing to work hard for opportunities to speak the gospel?
• Am I concerned to authenticate the gospel by my transformed and transforming life?
• Am I bold, urging hearers to respond to the gospel?
• Is my goal that the hearers of the gospel would become God-worshippers?

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Writing a new atheist

That’s one Christian does–quite well I think–to Sam Harris, a prominent leader in the new atheism movement.  Interesting to read. . .comment section is worth noting also. Read “An Open Letter to Sam Harris”

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Round trips to heaven and back

In recent years there have been a number of stories published by Christian publishing houses that relate how one person has gone to heaven and come back again.

Tim Challies offers some suggestions on how to respond to such books as well as to people who have read them and found comfort and peace through them.  Read “Heaven’s Tourism.” An excerpt:

“In the first place, we have no reason to believe or expect that God will work in this way—that he will call one of us to the afterlife and then send us back to our old bodies. The Bible says that it is for man to die once and then to experience the resurrection. There are many experiences we can have in a near-death state I am sure—dream-like experiences that may even seem real—but the Bible gives us no reason to believe that a person will truly die, truly experience the afterlife, and then return. Those who have a biblical understanding of life and death and heaven and hell will know that for a person to die and visit heaven, to experience sinlessness and the presence of Jesus Christ—for that person it would be the very height of cruelty to then demand that they return to earth. None of these books are at all consistent with a robust theology of heaven and hell, of the work of Jesus Christ, of the existence of indwelling sin. On the surface they may seem compelling, but in reality they raise far more questions than the few they may appear to answer.  . . .

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The anatomy of evil desires

All sin really begins in the mind, in our thought life or what the Scripture sometimes calls our imagination. Then when that happens James describes the process which involves our desires, “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” (James 1:14–15). As John MacArthur has written,

The flesh controls the imagination of the unredeemed (cf 1 Cor. 2:14; 2 Cor. 4:3–4), and if not kept in check, it can also affect the believer’s imagination (cfMark 14:38; Rom. 13:14; Gal. 5:24; Phil. 3:3). When the flesh feeds a sinful thought into the imagination, the imagination concocts a sinful fantasy scenario, that scenario excites lust, lust moves the emotions, the emotions activate the will, and the will initiates sinful conduct (see again James 1:14–15). The sinful imagination consists primarily of lies and distortions about oneself, personal relationships, personal fulfillment, the general nature of things, and God (cf Jer. 17:9; Mark 7:21–22; Rom. 7:23; 8:6–8). Such false perceptions lead people to all sorts of sinful behavior, which results in miserable guilt feelings. Therefore, since God has redeemed believers from an evil, lustful imagination, then they ought to guard their minds (Pss. 25:20; 39:1; Prov. 4:23; Luke 21:34; 2 John 8) [From John's commentary on 1 Peter, p. 74]

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No sweeter word!

There is no sweeter word in all the Bible than the word redemption!  It is one of God’s greatest works and one of the most precious words given to man!

“Great was the work of creation, but greater the work of redemption; it cost more to redeem us than to make us; in the one there was but the speaking of a Word, in the other the shedding of blood. The creation was but the work of God’s fingers. Redemption is the work of His arm” (Thomas Watson, Body of Divinity [reprint; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979], 146).

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