The plane takes off for southern California this Sunday. Six of us are going down to Boot Camp, a Salvation Army youth leaders conference. This will be followed by The Gathering, a territorial congress. Salvationists from all over the western territory will meet in Pasadena for 4 days to hang out, receive teaching, celebrate the graduation and appointment of a new class of officers, and hear from the General, Linda Bond, who will speak throughout the weekend. I like Salvation Army events. I have been to a handful of get togethers, seminars and conferences put on by TSA since I have been at the Kroc, and I always learn something. There are a lot of cool people in The Army too, and it's fun to network. Spending the week in California with good friends is a bonus too.
Well, I'm a week past the Resonance Music Ministry Conference. It was a lot of fun. God really blessed the day. I heard a lot of great feedback from the artists/guests, workshop leaders, and conference attendees. Still debriefing with key people, but it sounds like there is a good possibility that we will do it again next year. My OCD personality is already putting together options for the agenda next year. Here's hoping that it's easier this time. One of the things that I am learning about myself through big events like this is that it's more difficult to balance these things with my family life than I would like. Being pretty introverted like I am, dealing with a lot of people, while enjoyable, is very tiring. That being said, when my 19 hour work day on Saturday was over, I really needed to spend some time alone to decompress. Like at least 19 hours to decompress. The problem is, my family has missed me all week, and they really need me. I haven't quite figured out how to deal with that yet. Maybe I will have it figured out by next year.
So, tomorrow it will be 2 weeks until the Resonance Music Ministry Conference at The Kroc Center. I have had the opportunity to attend several really good conferences for church musicians. They were all in Southern California. I flew down, learned a lot, was really inspired to write music and play and record and better myself (and buy new guitars). The problem I always had was that I could never transfer that excitement to the rest of the team that didn't get to go, and that's a real bummer.
So, after about a year of prayer and planning with a great team of worship pastors from the Coeur d'Alene area, Resonance is going to bring that great conference experience to the inland northwest. It's my sincere hope that worship leaders from around the area will bring their whole teams for the encouragement, teaching and fellowship that this one-day event will provide.
Our morning speaker, Dr. Harold Best, has written two books that have greatly impacted my understanding of music: Music Through The Eyes of Faith and Unceasing Worship. I am thoroughly excited for what the Spirit will lead him to bring to us.
Our morning worship leader and evening speaker, Evan Wickham, probably hates it when people say, "Are you Phil Wickham's brother?" He is a great songwriter and musician in his own right. A couple of my favorites of his are below.
Throughout the day Brenton Brown and The Worship Republic will be leading workshops that will culminate in their leading us in music for the evening session. Brenton is a great songwriter who, in my opinion, doesn't get the credit for all the great songs he's written. Here's a few:
As of today, we have 199 people signed up for the conference, so space is running out. It's going to be a great day and I'm really looking forward to seeing what God does.
I lol'd:
Logic gates are super simple building blocks of any basic computer—and now science has created them out of crabs running into each other.
http://gizmodo.com/5902117/this-computer-is-filled-with-crabs
Just in time for Holy Week services, I upgraded my amp! I am currently playing through a Guytronix Ardmore head into an Avatar 1x12 cab. The Ardmore is a 7 watt, el84 amp with one 12AX7 in the preamp stage. I built it from a kit a couple years ago. It's a pretty cool, albeit simple, little amplifier. It has a single volume and tone and it takes my pedals really well.
The first change I made was with the preamp tube. I was using a sovtek 12AX7. I replaced it with a JJ 12AT7. This change effectively lowered the gain of the amp allowing me to get a little more clean out of it before it started breaking up.
The second change I made was to the speaker in the cabinet. I have been running a 15 watt Weber 12A100 Alnico for a couple years. It has a weird 2.8k spike in it that just wasn't working with the chimey nature of my amp. I replaced it with a 30 watt Weber Blue Dog Alnico. It really smoothed out the overall character of the sound. The sound guy at church noticed immediately. It sits in the mix better and isn't as annoying.
Happy Easter!
Today Major John enrolled 4 new soldiers and 5 new members out of the students from my last membership class. People have different opinions on whether or not official church membership matters. I was brought up in a very "loose" church when it came to membership. I have come to respect the process of becoming a member during my time with The Salvation Army. The thing I like the best, from a ministry perspective, is that these are the people that are standing up to say "count me in...I'm here to be involved."
I love that.
I am in for an eventful spring. We are fast approaching Easter, the biggest Sunday service of the year. We are busy practicing music and preparing for the flood of visitors that will attend Easter Sunday service at The Kroc Center. Shortly after that, I am teaching a workshop at the Northwest Division's Youth Councils (on the importance of truth). That brings us to May: my 30th birthday and the Resonance Music Ministry Conference. June opens up with a Territorial youth leaders conference, Boot Camp, which I am also teaching a short workshop at (don't know what about) followed by The Gathering, a Territorial Congress. It's a big deal. The General will be there. As soon as we get back from that event in Pasadena, my bosses are leaving. Majors John and Lani Chamness, my pastors and our executive directors, have been reassigned to head up the Hawaii Division. Their last day is June 17th.
Eventful.
We begin rehearsals for the Good Friday service at Kroc Church yesterday. One of the special songs we are doing is called Passover. It was written by Luke Abrams and Jeff Bettger of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. We are covering a version recorded by Joe Day (also from Mars Hill) on his album Grace. It's a great song. Check it out:
I am a musician. I love to listen to music. Play music. Sometimes though, I think my favorite thing to do is to shop for instruments. It's strange how gear can capture your heart. I currently own 3 electric guitars (Ibanez Artcore Semi-Hollow, Fender Telecaster, Danelectro Convertible) 2 acoustic guitars (Martin D-16 and Taylor GS8) a Fender Champion 600 and Guytronix Ardmore amp, 1x12 Avatar cab w/a Weber Vintage series speaker, a board full of pedals, a Schlagwerk cajon, a wurlitzer piano, plus a whole synth setup for my mac. The list of gear I have own in the past is 10 times that long. None of that includes all of the fabulous gear that I have access to at my work.
The crazy thing is that I always want more. I am never fully content. Right now I am eyeing a new Gibson hollowbody guitar, 3 different guitar amps, a replacement speaker for my cab, new tubes for my amp, a couple new pedals, and even some new cables. Most of these things are completely unaffordable for me too...really all of them. Yet the "need" for more never goes away.
I have a lot of respect for guys that have "a sound." You name a musician and you know what their setup is. It's as iconic as they are. There are whole genres of guitar tone named after them because that's "their sound." They get that by grabbing a guitar and an amp and playing if for all its worth. I need that reminder.
Now, there isn't anything wrong with new gear, different gear, better gear. But I always need to be examining my motives for wanting gear. Is there really a problem with my guitar? Is the best solution a $2400 new guitar, or a $25 new bridge on the current one? The solutions to my musical problems are more likely than not cheaper than I want them to be. Maybe even free. Often in my head.
That being said, if anyone sees a really good deal on a Fender Bassman, let me know.
Last week of the Membership class is done. We finished up by looking at The Salvation Army mission statement:
The Salvation Army, an international movement, is an evangelical part of the universal Christian Church. Its message is based on the Bible. Its ministry is motivated by the love of God. Its mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.
We looked at the Crest:
Then we looked at the flag:
We talked some about the Salvation Army's tradition of uniform wearing and then we zoomed in a bit to look at Kroc Church.
Kroc Church is somewhat of an odd thing as far as I can see in The Salvation Army world. First of all, the Kroc Centers are a new concept in service for The Salvation Army. We haven't quite done anything like them before. Secondly, our Kroc Church is a brand new corps. The Salvation Army came back to Coeur d'Alene in 2009 after being gone for 66 years. Thirdly, the Coeur d'Alene Kroc has been hugely successful, initially as a result of the amazing community support it received. All in all, we are an interesting corps.
Our mission at Kroc Church is the same as the rest of The Salvation Army. The way we put feet to our mission is called E3: Encourage, Equip and Engage. We encourage through hospitality, prayer, and generosity among other things. Equipping happens through all kinds of formal and informal teaching, and we engage our culture through service, outreach and evangelism.
We ended the class talking about the commitment of soldiership. I asked everyone interested in becoming a member of the church to write a brief testimony and share what they felt a person needed to know to become a Christian. Now I'm waiting for the final total of new members. We have an enrollment scheduled for April 1st.
Last week in the Kroc Church membership class we finished the doctrines (and there was much rejoicing) and started to talk about unique aspects of The Salvation Army. Doctrine #10:
We believe that it is the privilege of all believers to be wholly sanctified, and that their whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We talked about what it meant to be sanctified, and I chose to focus on what it means that our bodies are to be sanctified. We have this weird idea that God is only concerned about our souls, but the truth is, He cares about our whole person. We looked at sanctification as a process (2 Corinthians 3:17-18) and as a partnership (Romans 8:1-11, 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, Philippians 2:12-13).
It's possible to take the idea of grace and believe that once you raise your hand or pray a prayer, God requires nothing more of you. The Bible however, places a great emphasis on our personal holiness.
Other people over the years have created an unhealthy relationship between the body and the soul. Neo-Platonism in the 1st and 2nd centuries taught that matter was evil and the spiritual world was good. Therefore the way you treated your body wasn't important. We looked at how even Christians today can have that attitude if we are not careful when we say "it's all gonna burn!" The body belongs to the Lord.
Doctrine #11:
We believe in the immortality of the soul; in the resurrection of the body; in the general judgment at the end of the world; in the eternal happiness of the righteous; and in the endless punishment of the wicked.
Doctrine 11 can be a tough one to swallow for some people. We are immortal beings and there is a judgment coming. There is a judgment for believers (1 Corinthians 3:5-10) as well as unbelievers (Revelation 20:11-15). We have a great hope for a future world that is free from sin and death, however there is a real, eternal judgment coming for those who reject Christ and choose to be the lords of their own kingdoms instead of submitting to His lordship.
We moved on from there to look at some specific traits of Salvationists. We talked about the sacraments and TSA's position to not ritualistically mandate communion and baptism. We practice this as a witness to the rest of the Christian church that water baptism and communion do not save; it is grace of Christ that saves us. I also throw in a pertinent quote from the 2008 International Spiritual Life Commission:
Our position as Salvationists is a position of freedom. The response of Salvationists worldwide to their freedom in Christ may be diverse, differing with the cultural context of indigenous Salvationist mission. Such freedom and diversity are to be prized as part of our heritage as Salvationists.
Finally, we moved on to a quick overview of officers, territorial, divisional and local structure, and a fun Salvation Army Terms matching game. Our Corps has very little traditional Salvationism in it (other than our effort to preach the gospel and meet human need) and many of the terms that are sometimes used are absent in our Corps. For instance, our Corps is called Kroc Church. We do not use the terminology "penitent form," (altar) "fire your cartridges," (tithes and offerings) or "Holiness Meeting" (church service). However we do talk regularly about officers, soldiers, World Services, and being Promoted To Glory. I believe there is a healthy mix of the new and the old in our Corps, and I am glad for it.
I got to spend the last two days at a local church called Real Life Ministries going through their Immersion training. Hopefully I will get a chance to write more about it later, but for now, I have to say that I wish more of our team had been there. I was joined by my boss, Bill Davenport, and we both got a lot out of it. They do good work at Real Life, and I'm glad I got a chance to attend.
So, I am taking a preaching class in school right now. One of the smaller assignments is to read some journal articles on preaching and write synopses of them. So, I got on the library database and found an article on "Easter Preaching" by David R. Buttrick in the journal Interpretation. I don't know anything about Buttrick or Interpretation, but I think, "Hey Easter's coming up. This should be interesting." I was disappointed. While the author correctly points out that the Easter audience will be wide and varied beyond a typical Sunday, and while he also states that resurrection is more than just a personal promise but also the restoration of all things in God's kingdom, he completely devalues and even denies the veracity of the gospel accounts, and his basis for this is the work of atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann!
Lüdemann's work is just not good. His arguments are consistently beaten biblically and philosophically in debates and in writing by William Lane Craig. It just blows my mind that pastors would be entering their pulpits on Easter Sunday with a message of hope and life to come without the support of the truth of the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ. To quote Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:17-19:
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
Our faith is built on facts. If we lose those facts, there is nothing left that is commendable about Christianity.
Doctrines 7-9 are so awesome! (They are all awesome, but for different reasons.) Doctrine #7:
We believe that repentance towards God, faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and regeneration by the Holy Spirit, are necessary to salvation.
Repentance, faith and regeneration. Repentance is a change of mind. We sometimes forget that and make repentance about a change in actions. That comes later. It's really a change of allegiance from one god (usually yourself) to another God (Jesus). Repentance is a one-time action and a continual action throughout our Christian life because we tend to drift from following after Jesus.
Faith is incredibly important to understand. The ESV Study Bible, in its notes on Hebrews 11:1, says:
…faith is a settled confidence that something in the future—something that is not yet seen but has been promised by God—will actually come to pass because God will bring it about. Thus biblical faith is not blind trust in the face of contrary evidence, not an unknowable “leap in the dark”; rather, biblical faith is a confident trust in the eternal God who is all-powerful, infinitely wise, eternally trustworthy—the God who has revealed himself in his word and in the person of Jesus Christ, whose promises have proven true from generation to generation, and who will “never leave nor forsake” his own.
Our faith is only as good as the object of our faith. We can have all the faith in the world, but if the thing that we have faith in fails us, we lose. Jesus will never fail us and it is faith in Him that saves.
Regeneration is about being made new. Salvation transforms us into "new world" people. We can have confidence in our relationship with Christ. We can know that we are saved.
Doctrine #8:
We believe that we are justified by grace through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and that He that believeth hath the witness in himself.
Grace is one of the "big ideas" of the Christian faith. It is so hard for us to grasp the idea that we do not earn, and do not maintain, our salvation through our own effort. We often desperately want to be thought of as useful when it comes to acquiring our faith. It's all Jesus and none of us. We make a decision to follow, but that's it. There aren't any good deeds or right views that can enhance or change that. It's the glorious truth of the Christian faith that is unparalleled throughout other religions. God really loves us. He loves us with an unending, everlasting love that is totally dependent on his character and totally independent of our actions.
Doctrine #9:
We believe that continuance in a state of salvation depends upon continued obedient faith in Christ.
This was the biggie. I was literally beaming at the prospect of "discussing" this controversial topic with the group. We have about 25 in the class, so we broke up into 5 groups and I laid out a chart comparing Calvinist and Arminian soteriology with verses to back up each of the 5 points of either view. The group wrestled with the text of the scripture for about 30 minutes. It was fun (for me anyway). Everyone came away with their opinions, but I hope we all realized that godly, biblical men and women have taken both sides of the argument for hundreds of years and that we are free to hold to the view that we see as the most biblical as long as it doesn't 1) downplay personal holiness, 2) discourage evangelism, 3) magnify human works, or 4) cast doubt on the omniscience of God.
So, I went to Victoria, British Columbia last weekend to visit a Salvation Army church called High Point Church. It is pastored by Lieutenants Peter and Alison Lublink. I "met" Peter about a year and a half ago on Facebook because he makes some of his own uniforms. We have sort of kept in touch over twitter and he recently told me that it would be great if I could come up and see what the Lord was doing in the church in Victoria. I had just come off a couple weeks of preaching and had a free Sunday which corresponded to the grand re-opening of their building, so I decided to drive up. I am currently reading a book that uses sports metaphors to describe the church. In light of that, they play the game a little differently up in Canada. Victoria, according to Peter, is very non-Christian. I was told that something like 3% of the city professes faith in Christ. There are large groups of atheists, other religious adherents, and general spiritualists. High Point Church is the only church in their area of the city. It's an incredibly different context than the one that I work in.
One of the exciting things for me though is that immediately after arriving there, I was in the presence of the body of Christ. I love that no matter where you go, Jesus' bride is there faithfully fulfilling her calling. I got to attend the back half of a cell group meeting on Thursday night and Friday I was given a tour of the facility and neighborhood. They were busy remodeling and I got to spend some time helping set up their light board. Saturday I got to see a little bit of the city, and Sunday I got to play synth for the worship service.
Sunday morning was great. I was told they typically have 70 in attendance. 120 showed up. I got the impressed that the Lublinks were well loved by the community, and many came out to see their new meeting place who didn't follow Jesus. A testimony was given and Peter shared the gospel with the group. I met many people who had been changed by the gospel through High Point over the years.
I can tell that Peter and Alison see a chance to really change their city with the gospel of Jesus and they aren't afraid to be creative with their methods to achieve that goal. The way I saw them live and contextualize the gospel was refreshing. Their lives motivated me to move forward on some things that God has been stirring in me for awhile.
I got four days of not worrying about a ministry. I got to serve and watch as other people did their thing. We shared ideas and stories, disagreed a little, and had some fun too I think. They were great hosts and tour guides. I am looking forward to returning the favor some day soon.
We had a really great membership class on Monday. We started with a review of last week's topics. This quickly turned into an impromptu discussion of the reliability of the Bible. Some quick facts about how the Bible stacks up amongst other historical documents can be found here. We can trust God's Word. So, this week we started with doctrine #4:
We believe that in the person of Jesus Christ the Divine and human natures are united, so that He is truly and properly god and truly and properly man.
The fancy theological word for this is the "hypostatic union." Similar to the trinity in it's weirdness, Jesus was, and is, both fully God (the second person of the trinity) and fully human. We looked at evidence for Jesus' divinity (John 8:58 and John 10:30 among others) as well as evidence for his humanity: John 1:14, Hebrews 2:17 and Philippians 2:5-7.
The great thing about this truth is that it shows that 1) Jesus has the ability to pay for our sins as a human representative with the sinless deity worthy of such a huge sacrifice, and 2) Jesus understands us. He's been there. He probably lost his earthly father at a young age, he grew up poor and misunderstood, he worked hard with his hands, he was ridiculed by friends and family, betrayed and denied by his closest companions, and brutally murdered even though he committed no crimes. If you can resonate with any of that, realize that Jesus gets what you're going through probably more than you do.
We briefly talked about the Chalcedonian Creed in 451ad that put to rest this issue. It's important to understand the theological battles of the church in the past, because the Devil continues to use the same old tricks. When the Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons and others deny the deity of Christ, we can understand that that issue was already dealt with fifteen hundred years ago and that just because it has come up again doesn't mean the argument has any more merit than it did then.
Doctrine #5 is a heavy one:
We believe that our first parents were created in a state of innocency, but by their disobedience they lost their purity and happiness, and that in consequence of their fall all men have become sinners, totally depraved, and as such are justly exposed to the wrath of God.
Total depravity is a foreign concept to our culture. Voices from everywhere talk about how people are "basically good" and they go wrong because of their environment and the things that they are taught. You'd think that anyone with children would laugh at that idea. We are born in sin, wicked rebels, dedicated to our own selfishness at the expense of God's law. The class was thoroughly depressed by Isaiah 64:6, Jeremiah 17:9, Psalm 51:5 and Romans 3:10-11.
Total depravity doesn't mean that all that humanity does is totally evil, but that all of our good works can never meet God's holy standard. We bear the image of God that Adam and Eve (real people btw) have passed down to us, but it is marred by sin. We are unable to fix it and deserve to be destroyed for our wickedness.
This doctrine is incredibly important. First, it tells us that something has gone terribly wrong. Things are not the way that they are supposed to be. God is not the author of evil. Secondly, it helps us to understand sin. In their book Doctrine, Mark Driscoll and Dr. Gerry Breshears quote Cornelius Plantinga:
The Bible presents sin by way of major concepts, principally lawlessness and faithlessness, expressed in an array of images: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it - both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God.
Doctrine #5 further helps us understand our need for a savior. Because we can't fix the sin problem, someone else needs to, and that brings us to doctrine #6.
We believe that the Lord Jesus Christ has by His suffering and death made atonement for the whole world so that whosoever will may be saved.
There is a lot of confusion about whether or not the Bible is true, whether we can trust it. I think it's very important to understand that our faith is built on facts. I gave 5 facts in class that support the resurrection. Theses are not points of faith that Christians hold to; these are historical realities that secular historians have to explain away if they are to deny the Bible.
- Jesus was crucified.
- Jesus' disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them.
- The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed into a Christian evangelist.
- The skeptic James, Jesus' brother, was suddenly changed and became a leader in the church.
- The tomb was empty.
Jesus really did die on the cross and the world was changed because of it. The only reasonable explanation for this is that Jesus actually rose from the dead like the Bible says. So what did his sacrifice do?
Jesus made atonement. The word atonement holds two other words: propitiation and expiation. To propitiate (1 John 2:2, Romans 3:25) means to "satisfy the anger of a deity." The word expiate means "to remove guilt." There is a great picture of this in Leviticus 16. In it, Moses describes a procedure that is carried out once a year on what is called The Day of Atonement. All the people of Israel gather and confess their sins. The high priest places his hand on a goat and confesses the sins of the people, symbolically transferring them to the goat. Then they kill the goat. The death of the goat covers the sins of the people for a year. Then they get a second goat and the high priest confesses the people's sins on that goat. But this time, they drive the goat out into the wilderness so that it can't find its way back to the camp. The sins of the people, symbolically transferred to that goat, are removed from the people for a year.
Jesus, whose sacrifice was better than that of goats, satisfies God's wrath against our sin and removes our sin from us. He is the perfect sacrifice, and the benefits of his offering are available for anyone.
Doctrine #6 reminds us that we have a faith built on facts, that our sins can really be forgiven and that God is not angry with us, and that our sin has been removed from us forever and will never be brought up again. Praise God!
Here's my problem with this classic debate: time. I readily admit that I haven't read all the literature on this subject, but from the books I have read, the Calvinists believe that those who are predestined to salvation are elected in eternity past. He then empowers them by His Spirit to have faith and believe. Arminians believe that God sees into the future, through his foreknowledge, those who will believe on His name and elects them based on their faith.
Both of these ideas require God to exist in time. Granted, this concept of God can travel through time, or at least see into the future like a wizard with a crystal ball, but He deals inside a concept of time nonetheless. If God exists outside of time, if time was created with space in Genesis 1:1 (that's an Einsteinian thing) then it is possible that God elected those predestined for salvation in His foreknowledge while simultaneously knowing that the elect are those that respond to Him in faith without any need for a "what happened first" discussion.
Doesn't that solve the problem?
So, on Monday at Kroc Church Membership Class we talked about the concept of doctrine and looked at Salvation Army doctrines 1-3. We looked at how doctrines have different levels of importance. I shared Mark Driscoll's levels of doctrinal importance that correspond to national and state borders. I also used an example that I stole from Dr. Gerry Breshears. Dr. Breshears says that there are Die For issues, Divide For issues, Debate For issues and Decide for issues. The important thing is that we have the Die For issues (salvation by grace through faith, the trinity, the exclusivity of the gospel, one God) in the right place. There are scads of other things that fall into the other categories. There are some legitimate things that we may need to divide for as Christians that don't reflect upon our salvation. There are also some things that we should believe and commit to living with each other in our differences. We get in trouble when we move the Debate Fors and the Decide Fors into the Die For category or, conversely, when we put the Die Fors into a lower category.
After that we looked at Salvation Army doctrine #1:
We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God and that they only constitute the Divine rule of Christian faith and practice.
We looked at the issue of inspiration and we discussed inerrancy (2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:21). We looked at different ways to gain information (our experiences, the teaching of others, and the Word of God) and saw how the first two, while useful, can fail us. Because of this, scripture is our highest authority. The Salvation Army's doctrine on scripture is very old (the doctrines were developed in 1878)
Doctrine #2 is:
We believe that there is only one God who is infinitely perfect, the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of all things, and who is the only proper object of religious worship.
We checked out the idea of monotheism, the scriptural evidence for it (Deuteronomy 6:4), and why it is important. That's one thing that I want to keep in the forefront of any discussion on doctrine. If doctrine is a subject that we learn and then set up on a shelf to get dusty, we missed the point. Doctrine is a systematic explanation of the truth we find in scripture. It needs to be the basis for how we live our lives. If these doctrines don't shape our understanding of the world, they are worthless. Monotheism is important because if there is a single being that created the universe, our world, and ultimately each of us, we are accountable to him. In a polytheistic or atheistic universe we are ultimately accountable to no one. It's a big deal.
Doctrine #3:
We believe that there are three persons in the Godhead - the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, undivided in essence and co-equal in power and glory.
The trinity is probably one of the hardest to understand doctrines on this list. How does it work, and why does it matter are big questions here. Really, no one knows how it works. The word trinity isn't in the Bible. However, it is a word that was coined by a church leader named Tertullian in ~200ad. It is a compound word (tri and unity) that means three in one. The concept of the trinity was not invented, but discovered as God interacted with his people over the centuries. It is all over the Bible (Genesis 1, Deuteronomy 6:4-5, Matthew 3:16-17, Matthew 28:19, and many others). God exists and has existed eternally as three distinct persons.
The tricky thing with the trinity is the "who cares" question. There may be a myriad of reasons why understanding the trinity is important. We looked at 2 of them.
- Love is absolute. - For God to be love, as the Bible tells us (1 John 4:8), love needs to be eternal. If God is a singularity, God is incapable of love prior to creating something to love. Therefore, love is not eternal. However, if God is a trinity, as we see Him in scripture, He has eternally been the giver, receiver, and spirit of love in the relationship of Himself.
- We need people. - We are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). The first thing that God says is not good after He creates the world is that man is alone (Genesis 2:18). Man has God, but that's not enough. In order to image God well, man needs an equal partner to give and receive love and community with. That's the basis of marriage, but I think it's much more than that. I think God's eternal community is the basis of our need for one another. Human beings need each other, and I believe that's because we are created in the image of God, who Himself is in community.
- How We Got The Bible: Neil R. Lightfoot (This is a fairly easy read on inspiration, inerrancy, and other Bible stuff)
- A General Introduction To The Bible: Norm Geisler & William Nix (This is a very academic, detailed version of the same)
- So What’s The Difference?: Fritz Ridenour (A simple comparative religions book)
- The Knowledge of the Holy: A.W. Tozer (Tozer blows my mind)
- Doctrine: Mark Driscoll & Gerry Breshears (Driscoll and Breshears are Calvinists [that's week 4], but there is a lot of great stuff in here)
