An interesting sermon yesterday, and I mean “interesting” with every bit of passive-aggressive nuance that Minnesotans are famous for. We’ve been on a short summer series called “Unshakable”, looking at stories of the “heros of faith” in Hebrews 11. Not an especially earth-shattering topic, but it’s a chance to consider various aspects of faith. Yesterday we considered the story of Stephen, “a case study of faith to die for.” The underlying premise/question was “Do I have a faith worth dying for?” In that certain inimical pastoral way, the answer was boiled down to a four-point sermon outline.
Consider first that our church is a conservative, leaning very conservative, Minnesota Baptist church. I would call it a stereotypical conservative American Evangelical Protestant church, but that might sound negative (there’s that passive-aggressive tendency I referred to above). As such, we get a fair bit of “culture war” preaching in the guise of Biblical principles.
With that context in mind, “a faith worth dying for” was couched in the terms of the question, “what is biblically certain, but politically incorrect?”, with the story of Stephen woven throughout. Yesterday, at least, the answers – vastly summarized here – were:
- Life begins and finds its value in God. As human beings, we do not have the authority to determine for ourselves when to create and when to end life. (Gen 1:1)
- Male and female express God’s explicit design. Any other pattern or expression of relationship is biblically incorrect. (Gen 1:27)
- Israel is the Covenant land and people of God. There is no distinction between Israel the political state and Israel the Covenant land of God. (Gen 17:8)
- Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation. In the vortex of a pluralistic, relativistic culture, there has been, is and will only be one path for eternal salvation. (John 14:6, Acts 4:12, Rom 10:9-10)
Essentially, we ought to be willing to defend and/or die for any one of these expressions of faith. Or more generally, we ought to be willing to defend and/or die for an explicitly biblical lifestyle against the prevailing winds of current culture.
I know that in terms of accepting the above four points, I choke hardest on #3, Israel. TC just wrote about dismantling dispensationalism on his blog, rejecting that -ism’s viewpoint that “God has a distinct program for Israel and a distinct program for the church” in favor of Jesus as the New Israel with all peoples united in him (Eph 2:15-16). I don’t know for sure if my pastor is a dispensationalist, but my hackles tend to raise whenever someone starts pushing support of Israel as “the Christian thing to do”, whether it be political, economic, religious or theological. I guess I tie it too closely to escapist eschatology and ridiculous rapture watching, especially those American Christians who make a trip to “the homeland” as some sort of pilgrimage.
I wonder, which or how many of the above four points would you be willing to wager your life on?
After 
In response to a recent comment on Facebook about Greg Boyd’s “
Will Twitter save the TNIV?
HT: Mike Aubrey (via Facebook)
The middle of the article contains some interesting historical info on the introduction of “he” as a universal pronoun and what was used before it:
So there you go – the TNIV has history on its side. And perhaps if the tweeting masses catch on, history will repeat itself: