Learning and Living the God-centered Life

I am privileged and honored to teach at Carmel Baptist starting this fall a foundational course on Christian living. This blog will be an opportunity to post class lessons as we move through this one year curriculum of study.
Here is a note this week to the leadership team.

Hope all is well in Charlotte and that you are having a great summer. This has been a time for me to study, reflect and process through the realities of God's word. In our time of study over the past years we have discussed that the Bible is inspired, revealed, inerrant and infallible. However I fear that we as Christians in America have lost our moorings as it relates to making the Bible the plumb line of our lives. My attention this summer has been focused on the following theme of study "Learning and Living the God-centered life." Unfortunately we have many in the church who hold to one of the extremes. Those who want to just learn about the Bible, these folks after years tend to just "show up", and those who want to talk about the experience of the Christian life and these folks tend to "blow up." In my study and teaching this fall and beyond I am proposing to bring these two tensions together to help those in the body of Christ "grow up." I would like to bring Biblical clarity to the practical way of living a God-centered life, as we come to see and savor Christ. In the study of Philippians which has been called the epistle of joy, we studied Philippians 2:12-13 - So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. We can see in these two verses a summary of the Christian life, one is what we are to do and the other is what God is to do.
Maybe it could be summarized by the following:
1 Grace comes down
2. Joy rises
3. Love overflows

Each year I have the privilege to study I am more and more convinced of the following:
- learning to living
- root to fruit
- doctrine to delighting
- seeing to savoring
- believing to behaving

In other words right thinking leads to right thinking in the Christian life. Unfortunately in the 20th Century, which will be known as the century of self, many Christians have tried to bypass the right thinking and go to right living. And for many people that means unlearning what they have learned incorrectly. The air of American culture that we breathe everyday is so dangerous to our learning and living the God-centered life. If you can picture a river with a strong current that is flowing swiftly in one direction. Now drop some Christians in that river in which the current is made up of corruption, demonic influences, sin nature, and the world. There is no way you can put your life in neutral because the current will simply sweep you away. Therefore the apostle Paul writes things like "fight the good fight." He uses metaphors for the Christian life of a builder, boxer, a runner and a solider. I have lots of conversations with people in the church as I have taught over the years. There is too little reading of the Bible, meditating, wrestling and discussing of God-centered principles of Christian living. We have delegated those things to Sunday morning and Wednesday nights in Charlotte. But I am proposing a God-centered saturation of learning and living of the Bible to the point that when you bump up against someone or something then you bleed Jesus.
It must start with a learning and knowing the God of the Bible. The best way to do this is to study the whole Bible in which God has graciously revealed Himself to us. Of course we understand the Bible to be everything that we need to know in order to have a personal and intimate relationship with God, but it does not contain everything that is known about God. Christians need to get back to a learning of the basic attributes of God such as:
- sovereignty
- self-sufficiency
- mercy
- grace
- holiness
- justice
- wrath
- love
- omniscience (all knowing)
- omnipresence (all present)
- omnipotence (all powerful)
- immutability (non-changing)

Again the living for God in to produce fruit follows the learning of God as it is the root. This is simplicity through tremendous complexity, as we study what it really means to be the Christian that one says they have become. By this I mean there are hard verses and hard things that we must come to learn about the God of this universe. We must let Scripture stand even when it appears that there are tensions that seem in our minds to be mutually exclusive. One prime example is how the sovereignty of God and the free will of man can co-exist at the same time. The great preacher Charles Spurgeon was once asked how he every hoped to reconcile sovereignty and free will, to which Spurgeon quickly replied "I never try to reconcile friends." American Christians have spent far too little time with the Bibles in hand and far too much time with the TV remote in hand. The Christian life is war, and not a vacation of comfort and convenience at Club Med. Go to this LINK for a quick update.

I am going to be sending out some emails that will give an introductory breakdown in these three phases of study:
1. A delighting in the supremacy of God
2. An enthusiasm and joy that results from us being satisfied in all that God is in Jesus
3. The overflow of love that manifests in holiness and obedience as we live out the Christian life

The teaching overview will begin with the end in mind. Therefore I will present what it looks like to live out the Christian life (stage 3). But as we start our teaching this fall it will begin with knowing the God of the Bible. Hopefully by beginning at the end, it will encourage those to hang in for a one to two year period of teaching, that I am praying will not be informational, but rather transformational in producing radical Christians for Christ!

Blessings,