Please join us this Sunday for a liturgical Christmas worship service titled, “You Shall Call His Name Jesus.” We will be doing guided responsive readings from the gospels, singing Christmas worship songs, and taking communion together. The service is a chance for us to worship Jesus, our savior and king, at this special time of year.
On December 27 in the Venture worship service I will be preaching a sermon titled, “How Can We Trust the Bible?” There has been some interest in this question by people in the Venture community lately, so I’d like to address the topic.
Here’s the problem, though: it’s a huge topic. There are many different specific questions that could be addressed in the short time that we have. So, I’d like your help. If you have any specific questions about the trustworthiness of the Bible, please either post a reply here or send me an email at danny@venture-online.org with your question. With Christmas coming up, the earlier you send me the question, the better. I hope to be able to get to all of your questions.
To give you an idea, here are some of the questions that I have now:
-How do we know that the Bible is the infallible word of God?
-Didn’t men write the Bible?
-Why are some books included and others not?
-How much of the Bible is taken from other belief systems?
Thanks for the help. I look forward to our time together on the 20th and the 27th.
In case you are looking for some reading, here are some books you might consider. Make sure to read my brief descriptions (and warnings in some cases). In general, I like to read books that challenge me. I’m not looking for the safest books, but the ones that make me think. I’ve listed them in categories. And, please, take my warnings seriously. If the things that I list in the warnings might offend you, please do not read those books.
Spiritual Formation/Psychology:
I’ve done a lot of reading this year on psychology and the spiritual life. I read about psychology this year because I realized that I am mentally unhealthy in many ways. The main thing that I have learned from my reading is that I have everything I need in Jesus. These three books brought this wonderful truth to my life in their own brilliant ways.
1. Timothy Lane and Paul David Tripp’s How People Change. This book is a fantastic look at how the gospel impacts your life. Right now. It gave me hope and insight this year as I struggled through different things.
2. S. Bruce Narramore’s No Condemnation: Rethinking Guilt Motivation in Counseling. Preaching, and Parenting. Is guilt from God? Or is it an expression of our moralistic pride? How do we deal with guilt and shame? This book is a careful treatment of these and other related questions.
3. Ed Welch’s Addictions- Banquet in the Grave: Finding Hope in the Power of the Gospel. Whether you are an addict of some kind (alcohol, drug, sex, food, etc.) or not, this book is a great analysis of how the gospel can bring hope and change to us in our sin. It shows how all of our addictions and sins are idolatry. Welch talks about how we have a worship problem: we want to worship ourselves rather than God. His book gives insight on how we can worship Jesus and ask God’s Spirit to turn us from our idols.
Theology and Bible:
4. N.T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. This book will put you right into the middle of the discussion on “The New Perspective” of Paul’s theology. Wright questions our traditional Reformation understanding of Paul’s letters in this book, which is written as a response to books and lectures by John Piper. I love this book because it is forcing me to go back to Galatians, Ephesians, Romans, and 1-2 Corinthians to see what I really believe about the gospel. (A word of warning: Wright does not hold to a traditional understanding of things such as justification and righteousness. If you want to balance his view, you might go to John Piper’s The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright. I plan on reading this book by Piper next year.)
Parenting:
5. Tim Kimmel’s Grace-Based Parenting. I found this book to be incredibly refreshing. I loved how he challenged me to raise my kids to be strong, not safe. I even learned a lot about God’s grace and love towards me when I read this book. It is beautiful.
Novels:
6. C.J. Sansom’s Dissolution. This mystery novel (first in a series of four) is set in the 1500s during the Reformation in England. A hunchback lawyer is sent to a monastery to solve a murder. I loved the setting of the novel, and the mystery was compelling. Also, the book forced me to think a little differently about the Reformation. (Warning: There is some bad language in the book. Also, you may not like the author’s take on the Reformation very much. I get the impression that Sansom is not exactly a big fan of the church.)
7. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. This is a post-apocalyptic novel that features a beautiful relationship between a father and son. It’s probably one of the best pictures of love that I have read or seen in a long time. In the midst of all of its dreariness, the story brings great hope to me. (Warning: the book contains language, violence, and allusions to cannibalism.)
Often one of the biggest barriers to our spiritual growth can be our desire to be moral. This sounds like the opposite of what you might think: isn’t it good for our spiritual growth for us to be good people? This desire to be good, however, can be very dangerous to our spiritual growth and to the gospel. In a recent article, Dr. John Coe of Talbot Seminary talked about this danger and called it “the temptation of moral formation.” He defined it as “attempting to deal with our spiritual failure, guilt and shame by means of spiritual efforts, by attempting to perfect oneself in the power of the self.” In a recent two-week Venture sermon series, we discussed Coe’s article and the temptation of moral formation. If you did not hear these sermons, I would encourage you to listen to them. Direct links to the sermons are here:
August 2 The Temptation to be Moral
August 9 Spiritual Formation and the Cross
The gist of the message of the sermons is this: we are to give up the quest to be moral, the drive to improve ourselves and assuage our guilt and shame through our own self-improvement efforts, and we are to rest in the perfect love, perfect forgiveness, and perfect acceptance that we have in Jesus.
I encourage you to listen to the sermons because this discussion is going to be very important to much of what we will be discussing as a community moving forward in sermons, retreats, etc. Also, practically, the sermons will help:
-to define what moral formation is, and how to identify it in our lives
-to understand why we try to improve ourselves
-to be honest about our weaknesses and failures, and to run to the cross
-to experience the perfect love, forgiveness, and acceptance in Jesus
-to trust Jesus to transform us and his Spirit to strengthen us to follow him
So listen to the sermons if you haven’t, and feel free to post any discussion here as a comment.
We have been preaching through Isaiah for the past 4 months and are nearing the end of the first major section, chapters 1-39. Before we move into chapters 40-66, we are going to take one Sunday, Feb 15, to summarize what we have covered and answer any questions you may have. So please, go ahead and submit your questions. They can be questions about the passages themselves, about applications that we have discussed, about the history and culture behind Isaiah…pretty much anything that has something to do with Isaiah 1-39. You can submit your questions as comments below, or you can send them by email to danny@venture-online.org, or you can simply ask them live on Sunday morning Feb. 15.
In the Venture worship service every Sunday there is a point where an offering basket will go by you. The “passing of the basket” can generate a lot of thoughts and emotions in people, including frustration (“Churches…always wanting money.”) or apathy (“I wonder where everyone is going for lunch.”) or guilt (“I think I should be putting something in here, but I’m not.”) or confusion (“Why do we do this every week?”).
In this post, I’d like to address three questions about giving to the church, specifically as they relate to Venture people giving to IBC. The questions are: Why should I give to the church? How do I give to the church? Why the urgency now? The answers to these questions will be personal, honest, and challenging to all of us in Venture. Read More…
In the sermon on Isaiah 6 this past Sunday, we were challenged to consider the differences between us and God. This is so that we can really understand why we are called to serve others, namely, for the glory of God and Christ. Three of the main differences between us and God are: Read More…
I am posting an outline of last week’s sermon, an introduction to the book of Isaiah. Isaiah is a complex book that covers a long period in Judah’s history. Therefore having these notes on hand will be helpful. Going through Isaiah is going to be important for us. The book is a clear call to servanthood. It challenges us to deny ourselves and to trust God to provide for us and give us strength to serve and love others. Here are the notes: Read More…
Jesus was a servant. The church is supposed to serve. But what does that service look like? What is the difference between a ministry that has a culture of service and one that doesn’t? This post will continue our review of the Venture fall retreat by asking the question, “What does a culture of service look like?” In the first of three posts about this, I will talk about 2 characteristics of a culture of service: a sense of calling and being willing to take risks. Read More…
I made a mistake in the sermon this morning. In a discussion for how wives are supposed to be a higher prioroty for husbands than other things (espcially career), I made a statement like this: “I talk to guys in ministry and they say, ‘Ministry first, Jesus first’, but that’s wrong. Your wife comes first.” Well, it was a mistake for me to say that our wives are more important than Jesus. This is not true. Jesus is certainly a higher priority for husbands (in ministry or not) than their wives. I had not planned on making this statement (and I did not even realize that I did say it until about 5 people approached me after the sermon about it). So please forgive me. I do not want to mislead you about this. Pursuing Christ and your relationship with him is the chief priority of everyone, including husbands.
At the same time, I think it is important that wives are a higher priority than anything else other than Christ, even more important than any ‘ministry’ that a husband might do (the actual point I was trying to make). If we are to truly love our wives and give ourselves for them sacrificially (Eph 5:25), then our wives have to be our highest priority (apart from Christ). And while the pull of career and achievement and ministry is so strong for husbands, they have to prioritize thier wives above those things.
Again, I aplogize for any confusion this caused you. Thanks a lot for your patience with me. Danny