Martin Luther

Ok, I admit it. I'm a theology geek. I have been recently meditating on Romans 6-8 and have found myself drawn to Luther's Heidelberg Disputation in my bedtime reading as a result. In my opinion this is one of his greatest works. In it he contrasts what he calls a theology of glory with a theology of the cross.

By theology of glory, Luther means adhering to the law. A theology of glory considers grace as a supplement to whatever I cannot accomplish by my own willpower. The problem with this is that the law and our efforts leave us unable to really change and deal with our brokenness. We take a low view of sin and its corrupting power, and too much stock in our own abilities. What is more, Luther views our good works as evil when they are done apart from God. Thesis 8 states, "by so much more are the works of man mortal sins when they are done without fear and in unadulterated, evil self-security." In addition, he states in thesis 16, "the person who believes that he can obtain grace by doing what is in him adds sin to sin so that he becomes doubly guilty."

The answer to this is the cross. "It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ" (thesis 18). We must know the God who has suffered. It is only through Christ's work that we are able to do any good work. Good works, done as law on our own, are addictive. Thus, the addict needs an intervention to change, and that intervention is the cross where God himself crucifies our desires, even the good ones when thought of apart from God. It is, then, not what we do but what we believe.

Sometimes we can shy away from delving into thinking on these things. Attending the next event or meeting is no substitute for reflection on the God who saves. But it is only through a robust theology of the cross that we will find true power and success in ministry. We will do well to think on these things.

Summer

Summer break is here. Some students stay and take classes, but most take off for home, summer job, or a myriad of other places. During this time it can be easy to drift from the routines established throughout the year of attending church and campus ministries, engaging in bible studies, and personal disciplines of prayer. Community, so important in the academic year, sometimes takes a break leaving us spiritually famished by the time the Fall semester rolls around. Let me encourage you to spend time this summer getting to know the bible book of Romans, specifically chapters 6-8. This passage will help in these next months to keep us grounded in the gospel of Jesus and ready to take on the next year.

The gospel is the work of God to restore humans to union with God and communion with others, in the context of community, for the good of others and the world. No better place than Romans 6 is there to stay personally on track, overcome my bad habits, and help others we meet who don't know what to do in their problems. As you read this chapter, notice that Paul wants us to: know the gospel by understanding our union with Christ; believe the gospel by reckoning it as true in your life; and, live the gospel by offering yourself to God as an instrument of righteousness.

Spend time each day thinking about these things and you will not only have a summer break, but a time of knowing Jesus, others, and yourself better. May God bless you as you seek to glorify him.

Vision Statement

Next week I will be going to Michigan for the month of June. God has given me a great opportunity to take some classes and interact with lots of people in various ministries as well as college ministries. I hope to keep some regular updates while there on what I am learning. For now, I am including here the short version of our recently developed college ministry vision statement. Please feel free to tell us what you think about this, that is, what you like, don't like, what you would add, subtract, or edit.

"We, as Bridgeway Church, declare that we love college students and the campus community. It is our desire to be a blessing to them through: helping students come to grips with how they fit into Jesus Christ and God's world; building and nurturing relationships with students in the church; and, encouraging and equipping students to contribute to furthering God's purposes on earth."

"Connecting college students to Christ, each other, and the world."

The Place of the Sacraments

Some have responded to an earlier post on Baptism and the Lord's Supper by wondering if I really believe the sacraments can play such a crucial role in the formation of a Christian worldview for college students. The short answer to that is "yes". Here is the longer answer, and I will frame it by asking two questions: what place do the sacraments have in the Christian life? and, why do we even need them since we have the preaching of the Word?

We get something in the sacraments that we don't get by sermons alone. The sheer physical presence of the elements of water, bread, and wine engages the whole person in sight, touch, and smell and not just through an engagement with the mind through the ears. The sacraments present the good news of Jesus to us, along with the Word, more clearly. Perhaps all of us have had the experience of receiving an e-mail with an attachment we cannot open. We may gain a certain amount of knowledge and understanding from the e-mail itself, but without the attachment the communication is insufficient and lacking. Holy communion and baptism are the attachments opened to us revealing the presence of Jesus among his people and showing us the incredible union we have with God through Christ's redemptive events.

We need more than just talk in communication of the gospel. Just as lovers need more than just the words "I love you" (sermon), they need an embrace, a kiss, some action that reveals and seals the words as real. This is the role of the sacraments in the life of faith, that they assure us, in a material way, of the great love shown to us in Christ (VanderZee, Christ, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, pp.191-2). They lift us to heaven where Jesus is seated at the right hand of God and help us to know the reality of grace. The Belgic Confession says this of what we are speaking:

"We believe that our good God, mindful of our crudeness and weakness, had ordained sacraments for us to seal his promises in us, to pledge his good will and grace toward us, and also to nourish and sustain our faith. He has added these to the Word of the gospel to represent better to our external senses both what he enables us to understand by his Word and what he does inwardly in our hearts, confirming in us the salvation he imparts to us."

It is a misguided belief that college students only need (or want) a worship service with praise choruses and a lively sermon. Two thousand years of church history testifies to the importance of the sacraments in the life of Christians. We push them to the periphery at our own peril. They are meant to seal the message of union with Christ to us with greater certainty. When they are practiced with the attention they deserve, along with the preaching of the Word, it provides a solid foundation from which to construct a decidedly Christian world and life view of human need and divine redemption. So, how do you view your life and the world around us?

Faith and Work

I have had a lot of jobs in my life, from white collar to blue collar, from the exciting to the repetitive and the mundane. I wish I could say that I have always had a positive attitude about all my jobs, but the reality is that I have had jobs I hated, and have done work that left me feeling completely dehumanized. College students get their education anticipating entering the "real world" of a career and a job. Making that transition from school to the working world is important. Here are some things I have found to be helpful in making the transition successfully.

First, a Reformed perspective on work has been tremendously helpful for me. The Reformers, like John Calvin, eliminated the long held medieval distinction between sacred work and secular work. They elevated all vocations into a calling blessed by God. All work is significant because God himself engaged in the work of creation. Work also involves, for the Reformers, worship. That is, we worship God through obedience to him in our jobs; our attitude makes work meaningful. Work, furthermore, provides a context for our continual learning about God. Our job, if we let it, can cultivate godliness, moderation, perseverance, and self-control. Thus, any job has the potential to transform us.

Second, we have opportunities to integrate our faith and work so that we don't end up having a working world and another world outside of work where the two never meet. David Miller in his book God at Work offers four ways of bringing our faith and our jobs together: connecting biblical ethics to concrete applications in the marketplace; seeing the workplace as a mission field to reach the lost; finding meaning and purpose in work through a Christian worldview; and, using my job as a means of personal change through working with others in community and fellowship.

Yes, all work involves a certain amount of toil and difficulty. But seeing it as the possibility of sharing in the work that God wants to do on this earth can help us in those times when we feel like we are going nowhere. In a day when the level of satisfaction for so many in their jobs is low, we need to recover looking at our vocation from a more biblical point of view. If college students can gain this outlook now, it can the means of transforming society for the better.

Sacraments and Worldview

A great task of the church, and a necessary pursuit for any college student, is to continually come in line with a Christian world and life view. Our postmodern and post-Christian society works against becoming spiritually formed according to biblical categories. The university, as important as it is, can be the vehicle of promoting a rival worldview to Christianity. More than one professor in my undergraduate experience told me that they enjoyed shocking freshman students into thinking in more secular terms and away from their "narrow" thinking about God and the church. Although that has been a few years ago, I still speak with students who feel like they are swimming upstream of the prevailing attitudes on reality in our society and university culture. One of the most significant means that the church can help inform students and promote a Christian worldview is through the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper.

Western society, and sometimes even the church, tends to hold to a cleavage between the spiritual and the material in an inherent dualism inherited from ancient Greek categories of thought. Yet, in the sacraments these two elements are firmly united. The good news of Jesus is not just proclaimed by stating propositions of truth, but, as Frank Senn has said in his book Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical the forgiveness of sins is declared "by sentences joined to a bath, the laying on of hands, and communal eating and drinking" (p.31). God is the creator of all things, both visible and invisible (Colossians 1:16). The incarnation is where the invisible God became a visible human. There is no dichotomous reality here between material and spiritual, but an essential unity. Leonard VanderZee has said that this unity makes the sacraments "a place where God meets us and where the spiritual and physical come together for our wholeness and healing" (Christ, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, p.28). Now that the Lord Jesus has accomplished his great redemptive events of cross and resurrection, the sacraments serve as material signs to us of the now invisible Christ. John Calvin called this a "visible word" that declares God's saving work in Christ on behalf of every human being.

There is certainly a profound place for didactic instruction in the church on a Christian worldview, and I would argue that it needs to take place. But this is insufficient. God himself has instituted baptism and the Lord's Supper as means of proclaiming forgiveness and declaring the unity of reality, and the great union we have with God because of Jesus. When we partake of this, we are doing much more than remembering; we are providing and re-enacting a view of the world that is in contradistinction from prevailing notions outside of Christendom. Here is where college students can find a place of seeing life from God's pespective.

Mentoring

In my recent conversations with college students, there is a comment that has risen to the surface. When it comes to having relationships in the local church nearly every student I have spoken to in the past month has expressed a desire to have a mentor(s) who will come alongside and walk with them through the uncharted territory of life. This is not only an admirable yearning, but a biblical one as well.

Of the many Old Testament passages that could be examined (including the relationship between the prophets Elijah and Elisha) there is one that is of interest. Isaiah 61:1 (which Jesus applies to himself in Luke 4:16-21) states that "the Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor" (emphasis mine). The Hebrew language is one in which there can be multiple meanings for one word. The phrase "preach good news" is one word, which also has the meaning "flesh" (Brown, Driver, Briggs, Hebrew Lexicon, p.142). In-other-words, preaching good news is not only a proclamation of certain propositions about the gospel, but is to be an "enfleshment" of the preacher to the person. To put it another way, a true form of preaching good news is in a mentoring relationship in which the mentor shares his/her life with the apprentice in coming alongside and helping in both word and deed.

This is exactly what Jesus did with his disciples, and is what true "discipleship" is. It is not simply getting through a three-ring binder of Christian doctrine and practice with a student, but a genuine investment of blood, sweat, and tears over time that forms another spiritually in knowing God. Paul also had mentoring relationships in mind when he urged Titus to teach the older believers so that they can, in turn, train the younger believers in godliness (2:1-8).

Reaching college students and seeing their spiritual formation realized is dependent upon our willingness, as people in the church, to be mentors. Students can also take initiative to approach others for whom they have found respect and maturity, and ask them to come alongside in a special relationship centered in Christ. But we in the church must not wait to be asked. The onus is on us to identify students in need, and offer a hospitable life which can nurture another into Christian truth and life. In this, we will pass on the love and grace of God to the generations to come (2 Timothy 2:2). May the Lord be honored in our efforts to do his will.

Church Renewal

In nearly 30 years of ministry as a pastor, layperson, and college minister, I have received enough letters, e-mails, and advertisements on church renewal to wallpaper every room in my house. Programs, conferences, Sunday School curriculum, and an endless stream of Christian literature all promise me and my church and ministry that if I just subscribe and adopt to their particular event or agenda that my congregation will be transformed. I won't take the time here to expound the theology that is behind this, and the biblical doctrines that are ignored in their presentations. Instead, I want to state why the churches I have been a part of have experienced renewal and transformation in two words: college students.

There is nothing that can bring new life and vitality to a church than the presence of college students who have taken hold of the redemptive events of Jesus, experienced the touch of the Holy Spirit, and see the sovereignty of the Father in directing their lives. They are truly a unique breed of people who, with their boundless energy and optimism born of their walk with God, proclaim to us Christians in the church that the Lord of Creation is still active and involved in doing what God does best: changing lives for his glory and honor. College students bring a spiritual dynamic to a local congregation that encourages an examined life of prayer, confession, repentance, and obedience. It is no wonder that the revivals and renewals of church history have been influenced and numbered by college students and twenty-something believers. George Whitefield, perhaps the greatest revivalist in history, was 19 years old when he began preaching and leading hundreds to Christ. Even a cursory look at the scriptures point to the vast contribution of young men and women to salvation history. David, Daniel, Mary the mother of Jesus, Jeremiah, Stephen, and Timothy were all young people who were mightily used of God and had a piety far exceeding the older religious establishment.

It would behoove us in the church to place less hope in our programs and plans and to be intentional about giving greater attention to reaching college students. In a later blog post I will address the importance of mentoring students in the church. But for now, consider the vast possibilities and opportunities the church has in students, and make every effort in prayer and ministry to spiritually form them in Christ. If we are looking for renewal and revival in the church, we need look no further than the 17 million college students currently enrolled in universities around the country, and rely on the Holy Spirit to change them and use them to their full potential as believers.

Death

We typically don't deal well with death in our American culture simply because we don't like to think about it. Yet, it is a reality we all must face. Couple this with the fact that suicide is a leading cause of death for college students, and we see that death is topic we must confront. Just last week I buried my Dad. He passed away on a Friday night, a visitation was on Sunday, and the funeral on Monday. Bing, bang, boom it was over. Typically we give three days for the process of grief. Most employers give only three days of bereavement pay. Most professors still want the work in on time. The expectation is that we get this grief thing all over with and move on with our lives as if nothing has happened.

Biblically, grief unfolds over a much longer stretch of time. It takes time to come to grips with what has happened and come to a resolution of the reality of the loss. Emotions need time to come out and be expressed through talking about the deceased, through lots of tears, and through listening to the stories of others about the loved one we no longer have. When, in the Old Testament, Jacob died, an extended time of bereavement occurred where the body was embalmed (a long process in Egyptian culture), a funeral procession ran from Egypt to Israel, and, once at the burial site, a period of thrity days was observed in mourning. Constrasted with our bereavement rituals, it is no wonder that college students often exhibit long periods of depression and anger months, sometimes even years after a death of a friend or family member.
Sometimes they may drop out of school altogether and are never quite the same.

Our well-meaning words to the bereaved can also add to the suppression of emotions. When words are offered that God works for the good of the death, that we can be joyful despite our loss because of heaven, or that it is time to move on and put the past behind us, we can unwillingly short circuit the needed process of grief, leaving the bereaved feeling guilty for not being able to cope better with the loss. Everyone's grief is personal, and everyone must have another who will offer a listening ear. Deeds often say much more than words for the bereaved. Bringing meals, helping with the dishes or laundry, or taking the dog for a walk are all examples of mercy and love that speak volumes to those experiencing loss.

So, let's not avoid death. Let's embrace it. Let's feel the full range of pain that is inevitable in such a loss. For, through the process of grief we can better experience the solidarity of identifying with the suffering Savior of our souls, and we can be agents of God's grace to the hurting. It is through these needs met that students come to know Jesus and the power of salvation.