We’re moving!  Thank you for reading the Magnify Christ blog.  It will now be kept up at johnbotkin.net.  Some of you have already caught that this is happening, and have redirected your browsers and feeds accordingly.

Thank you for reading and commenting!  Please continue to follow the blog at the new site. Thanks!

for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. (Gal 3:26-29)

Let’s pray for it to happen!

Regardless of what you do in 2011, if you are a Christian, make sure you plan to get into the Word of God.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a paragraph, chapter, or ten chapters, spiritual growth will only come by prayerfully reading the Scriptures. While the hardest part is just opening the book and reading, most people make it harder for themselves by not planning.  A plan could be simple, it could be complex–just do whatever it takes to hear the voice of God through his Word, the Bible. Here are some plans that might help:

M’Cheyne’s Classic Reading Plan

Originally written for his congregation, this plan is made up of four readings a day. It will take you through the Old Testament once, and the New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs twice in a year. D. A. Carson has been using this plan for years, and he’s also written some devotionals to go along with it.  Get the plan here.  Get Carson’s devotional in a free pdf format here.

Discipleship Journal’s Reading Plan

This plan has been around for a while and comes highly recommended by many.  This plans offers four readings and will take you through the Bible in a year with days to spare each month for catching up or review.  You can also adapt it to take you through the Bible at a slower pace.

Grant Horner’s Plan

The “Shock & Awe” of Bible reading plans.  Horner’s plan has you reading through the whole Bible in about five months, ten chapters a day, from ten different books.  Since the ten reading places are uneven, groupings of books, the result is a plan that is continually reconfiguring itself so you’re never reading the same ten chapters.  The goal is a deepening familiarity of the Bible and a better grasp of how it fits together.  Tim Challies and Bob Kauflin have both tried it and give some comments about.

A Chronological Reading Plan

Here is a chronological plan from B&H publisher’s Read the Bible for Life program.  It moves individual verses around, intermixing the texts of different parts of the Bible. (HT: Trevin Wax).

Design Your Own Plan

Maybe none of these plans are to your liking. If that’s the case, check out YouVersion.com which is devoted to getting you into the Bible.  There you can create your own reading plan.

UPDATE:

Mastering the Bible Reading Plan

Justin Taylor has an amazingly thorough post on Bible readings that went up after this one.  There he highlights a reading plan that I advocated earlier. What I didn’t know then was that an entire book had been written on it!  Justin points us to Fred Sander’s blog, which highlights a method meant to get you into the Bible, book-by-book.  Here the goal is not to simply get through a section in a year, but to get the Bible into you one book at a time, by reading and re-reading an individual book over and over again.  Check out Sanders’ post here.  Get Gray’s original book free from Google Books here.

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However you do it–take up and read!

There is a necessary place for religious pluralism in this fallen age because true Christianity can only spread without coercion. “My kingdom is not of this world . . . if it were my disciples would fight with the sword.” We must make room for other faiths to have free expression because faith in Christ cannot be forced. But there is no ultimate pluralism. No eternal pluralism—because God is God Almighty, and Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth. There are no parallel gods and therefore no parallel faiths. There is one true God and one Lord, Jesus Christ. In the age to come all that have rejected the true God and his Son Jesus Christ will be judged by God and cast out of the kingdom (Matthew 8:12). “He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life” (1 John 5:12).

Therefore Christianity has from the very beginning been an aggressively evangelistic way of life—for the sake of life, and love. Jesus commanded it as his parting passion for the church: “Go and make disciples.” He said just before he ascended into heaven, “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses” (Acts 1:8). The early disciples of the Lord had this word burning in their hearts, “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21). So they took up their cross and laid down their lives to be fruitful and multiply.

The result recorded in the book of Acts is amazing. . . .

From time to time in the life of the church there needs to be a wake up call to some simple and central and basic things. One of these is: Christianity is a converting religion. It is evangelistic. It is persuasive and expansive and missionary. It is not coercive. It does not use the sword, manipulation, or brainwashing. But it does proclaim, and persuade and plead and pray. And where this is not believed and practiced, Christianity ceases to be Christianity and starts to become another religion with another king who no longer says, “I am God Almighty; be fruitful and multiply.” When we lose a passion to see people won over to Jesus, we lose Jesus.

Christianity is a soul-winning, out-reaching, mind-persuading, heart-entreating, rescuing, missionary faith, or it is not true Christianity. We need to be reminded of this, because it is almost incredible how listless we can become while calling ourselves Christians. Little by little our whole orientation can become inward. We can go for months and years and not think about those who perish. We become so dull and spiritually callous that we don’t even ask if we believe in hell or lostness or the preciousness of Christ and the power of the cross and the freeness of the gospel and the command of Jesus. We just go about our in-house religious business like a medical clinic that sees fewer and fewer patients and has more and more staff meetings, until there is nothing left but a smooth running program for the doctors and nurses and their families. That is what happens to many churches.

- John Piper (emphasis added). Read more here.

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“Preparing for Christmas” is a series of posts helping prepare our minds and hearts to make Christmas a time of worshipping Christ. In this post, we want to consider the deity of Christ. Here are some resources toward this end:

• Begin with John Piper’s meditation on Christ as the one in are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

• Move on from there to consider Al Mohler’s article as he answers the question, “Must We Believe in the Virgin Birth?”

• Then, consider how the deity of Christ has been explained and defended throughout church history, even down to one letter in Rick Gamble’s piece, “Not One Iota.”

• Finally, listen to Mike Reeves’ sermon on gazing on the beauty of the Lord called, “The Glorious Son” (mp3).

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“Preparing for Christmas” is a series of posts helping prepare our minds and hearts to make Christmas a time of worshipping Christ. In this post, we want to consider the humanity of Christ. Here are some resources toward this end:

• Begin with Russell Moore’s reflection on whether or not Jesus could have gotten a cold.

• Then, move on to Mike Reeves’ article, “Smothering Baby Jesus” which shows why the Incarnation set theology off in the right direction.

• Finally, listen to Ligon Duncan’s talk on “The Humanity of Christ in the Gospels”.

*If you’re really keen on theology, check out the classic work by Athanasius of Alexandria (293-373), “On the Incarnation.”

In these posts, we’ve been looking at what effective, biblical ministry should look like.  Specifically, we’ve been looking at what ministry looks like in relationship to the culture around.  To do this, we’ve been looking at Paul’s words from 2 Corinthians 4:1-18.  We’ve seen that we can and should have an honorable ministry despite ridicule, a confident ministry despite rejection, a powerful ministry despite weakness, and in this final post we want to see that we can and should have a hopeful ministry despite suffering.

Paul begins this final section of verses (4:13-18) by quoting from Psalm 116.  He says, “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak” (4:13). Psalm 116 was written by David, giving thanks to God for the deliverance he received from his enemies.  And in the midst of that Psalm, David says that even as he spoke out to the Lord about his affliction, he believed the Lord would save him.  Likewise, Paul says he believes that God will deliver him from his sufferings.

But what kind of deliverance is Paul looking for?  After all, he didn’t escape sufferings—we just read about all the things he went through!  What is he talking about?  He tells us in the next verse. He says, I could believe in the Lord’s deliverance, even as I spoke of Christ “knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence” (4:14).   The deliverance Paul is looking for is not some escape from suffering, but a final deliverance on the last day.  He’s looking forward to the resurrection he will one day experience, just as Christ himself was raised from the dead.  And because that is what he has hope in, he can say, “For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. ¹⁶So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (4:15-16).

Paul is saying that though his physical body is wasting away—it’s breaking-down and dying like all bodies do, God is renewing his soul, preparing him for eternity.  Every affliction, every amount of suffering is simply a work in his life to grow him spiritually.  Furthermore, he says “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, ¹⁸as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (4:17-18).

Paul says, in the midst of all this stuff going on around him in this life, he’s got one eye on the future.  He knows that one day, just as Christ was raised up, so too will he be raised up from the dead, ever to die again.  And it’s that prospect of future glory with Christ himself that allows him to not lose heart.  Paul is looking ahead to an eternity of glorious fellowship with God in a body that will never get sick, never grow old, never fall apart; he sees the work of suffering in his life that is being used to spread the glory of Christ so that others having the darkness lifted from their eyes, and they are coming to believe in him, and he says, ‘I can do this. I can endure this.  Because this is nothing compared to what God is doing.’  Here is a man who’s been shipwrecked, mocked, beaten several times, gone hungry, been locked in prison and he says, ‘it’s worth it.’  Why?  It’s only because of the gospel of Christ.

Recently, our communities groups read about John G. Paton.  He was a missionary to the New Hebrides islands in the South Pacific.   As he was preparing to go, several people told him not to.  He was young, he was bright, and they thought it was a waste to send him to islands full of cannibals.  Yet, he would not be deterred from taking the gospel here. Finally, in exasperation, one elderly man yelled out, “”The cannibals! You will be eaten by cannibals!”  Paton simply replied, “Mr. Dixon, you are advanced in years now and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms. I confess to you that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether my body is eaten by cannibals or by worms.” Despite the prospect of suffering, we can have a ministry filled with hope, because we have seen what the future holds in Christ.

What does your life look like?  What kind of ministry for Christ do you have?  Do you understand the place of weakness of suffering?  Or have you fallen into the trap of believing the success are only those who have perfect lives that always stay together, never falling apart?  Have you come realize that when we are weak, God shows himself to be strong?

“Preparing for Christmas” is a series of posts helping prepare our minds and hearts to make Christmas a time of worshipping Christ.    Today, we offer some talks by Ligon Duncan and Derek Thomas, pastors at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS.  Here they explain the biblical, historical, and theological background to the best of our Christmas hymns.  Enjoy!

Derek Thomas on “ God Rest You Merry Gentlemen” (mp3)

Ligon Duncan on “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus” (mp3)

Derek Thomas on “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (mp3)

Derek Thomas on “Silent Night, Holy Night” (mp3)

Ligon Duncan on “Good Christian Men Rejoice” (mp3)

Derek Thomas on  “Away in the Manger” (mp3)

Ligon Duncan on “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” (mp3)

Derek Thomas on “It Came Upon the Midtown Clear” (mp3)

Derek Thomas on “While Shepherds Watch Their Flock By Night” (mp3)

Ligon Duncan on “Thou Who Was Rich Beyond All Splendor” (mp3)

Ligon Duncan on  “Joy to the World” (mp3)

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HT: Feeding on Christ

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"Preparing for Christmas" is a series of posts helping prepare our minds and hearts to make Christmas a time of worshipping Christ.  We begin by offering a resource that puts the coming of Christ into the larger storyline of the Bible.

This video is part of a larger project called, The History of Redemption, by the Austin Stone Community Church.  You can also get the audio for download, and buy the book.

HT: Justin Taylor

What does ministry look like today?  Do we have to be imitate the world?  Do we need to seek ‘coolness’ in order be acceptable to the world around us in order to minister effectively?  As we’ve already seen in parts 1 and 2, Paul says no.

Paul says the message of the gospel is like a treasure—it is valuable and precious.  Yet, he also says, “we have this treasure in jars of clay” (4:7).  What does he mean?  Simply this: we are the jars of clay.  You see, we aren’t the kind of treasure boxes pirates expect to find on lost islands—massive wooden chests with metal locks and hinges; something sturdy that will last for a long time.  That’s not us—Paul says, we’re more like clay pots.  We’re fragile and weak and easily cracked.

Think about that: the greatest treasure in the world: the gospel of Christ, and God entrusts it to use, mere jars of clay.  Why does he do that?  Paul says, “we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (4:7). The one with the power gets the glory, so if you’re weak and still serve God, his glory is magnified in you.

Paul understood this.  He was a clay jar if there ever was one.  Paul himself says he wasn’t much to look at.  He says he came to Corinth with meekness (10:1), like one who was weak and unimpressive (10:10).  Why do you think he describes himself like that?  Well, consider the kind of life he lived. He says he served God “by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, ⁵beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger” (6:5). He goes in chapter 11, to say he also experienced many “imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death. ²⁴Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. ²⁵Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; ²⁶on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; ²⁷in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure” (11:23-27).

Can you even imagine living that kind of life?  Can you imagine what Paul would have even looked like at this point in his life?  And it’s for all these reasons that the Corinthians despised him.  He wasn’t the kind of apostle they wanted—he was weak.  And yet, when Paul writes to defend himself in 2 Corinthians, he says ‘I feel like I’m insane, having to go down to their level, competing with these guys by boasting!  But if I’m going to have to boast, then I will boast in my weakness’ (11:16-30).  Why?  Because Paul has learned that he is weak, God is strong.

More than that, this weakness is part of the very message Paul is bringing.  In verse 8 he says, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ⁹persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ¹⁰always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. ¹¹For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. ¹²So death is at work in us, but life in you” (4:8-12)

When Jesus experienced weakness, suffering, and death, he did it to secure salvation for sinners.  He willingly stood before God as their representative and took the punishment we deserve for our sinful rebellion against God.  Yet, being God in the flesh, Jesus wasn’t held down by death, but was raised up to life again to forever reign as King over all things.  That’s gospel—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for sinners.  And Paul says, every time he experiences weakness, the power of God is made manifest in his life, and when that happens the message of the gospel is made all the more clear.

So, how weak are you, dear Christian?  I’m not asking you to compare yourself to the apostle Paul or anyone else for that matter. I’m simply asking how weak are you?  Do you go around thinking if you’re to be effective as a witness for Christ that you have to look great, or speak well, or be savvy with the culture, or an expert in apologetics?  Do you think your life has to be all put together with no problems before someone will listen to you?  If so, the God might not be able to use you.  What he can use isn’t cups of gold, but jars of clay.  For when we are weak, he is strong.  When we minister for Christ and proclaim his name in our weakness, then God is shown to be powerful.