Knox Theological Seminary has launched The New City Catechism Project, a video series featuring Dr. Michael Allen, Kennedy Professor of Systematic Theology and Dean of Faculty. Developed by Dr. Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, The New City Catechism consists of fifty-two questions and answers adapted from the four great catechisms of the Reformed tradition: Calvin’s Geneva Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Larger Catechism, and the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Each week we will feature one question and answer from Dr. Allen’s series.

Watch Question #12: What does God require in the ninth and tenth commandments?

I was was recently interviewed by Matt Smethurst for The Gospel Coalition about my reading habits and about the books that have most influenced me.  Here’s the interview:

What’s on your nightstand right now?

My nightstand is a mess—the biggest eyesore in our bedroom (according to my wife). I have about 30 books piled up on top of each other. I’m constantly reading, and I’m always reading more than one book at a time. I have everything from books I’ve been asked to endorse to books I’m consulting for my current sermon series to books I’m reading for fun.

I’m also a curious reader, which means I’m always reading books by people just to find out how they write and what they say about certain things—which means I’m not simply reading books by people within my theological tradition. One of my concerns about some who would consider themselves “reformed” is that they only read books by other “reformed” people. This, in my opinion, is a big mistake. And when some do read books outside their own theological tradition, they only do so with an eye to critique instead of an eye to learn. At least this was my mistake for far too many years. I graduated from a well-known reformed seminary (and am unbelievably grateful for the education I received there), and I never heard of any of the books, theologians, or scholars I list below (except one). I have, therefore, greatly varied my reading over the past five years or so and am reading many more books by writers, thinkers, and scholars outside of my theological  tradition. Seven years ago I heard Tim Keller say, “When you read one thinker, you become a clone. Two thinkers, you become confused. Ten thinkers, you begin developing your own voice. Two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise.”

So a few books on my nightstand right now include: Humble Orthodoxy by Joshua Harris, Luther: An Introduction to His Thought by Gerhard Ebeling, The Foolishness of Preaching by Robert Capon, On Being a Theologian of the Cross by Gerhard Forde, The Mockingbird Devotional by Ethan Richardson and Sean Norris (eds.), The Genius of Luther’s Theology by Robert Kolb and Charles Arand, This American Gospel by Ethan Richardson, Between Noon and Three by Robert Capon, The Reconstruction of Morality by Karl Holl, Living by Faith by Oswald Bayer, Handling the Word of Truth by John Pless, and How to Talk So People Will Listen by Steve Brown.

I’m learning, in the words of Eugene Peterson, that “discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own.” The way many of us think about sanctification is, well, not very sanctified. In fact, it’s terribly narcissistic. We spend too much time thinking about how we’re doing, if we’re growing, whether we’re doing it right or not. We spend too much time pondering our spiritual failures and brooding over our spiritual successes. Somewhere along the way we’ve come to believe that the focus of the Christian faith is the life of the Christian.

Ironically, I’ve discovered that the more I focus on my need to get better, the worse I actually get—I become neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with our performance over Christ’s performance for us actually hinders spiritual growth because it makes us increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective—the exact opposite of how the Bible describes what it means to be sanctified. Sanctification is forgetting about yourself. “He must increase but I must decrease” (John 3:30) properly describes the painful sanctification process. “Decreasing” is impossible for the one who keeps thinking about himself. As J. C. Kromsigt said, “The good seed cannot flourish when it is repeatedly dug up for the purpose of examining its growth.” Thankfully, the focus of the Bible is not the work of the redeemed but the work of the Redeemer. The gospel frees us from ourselves. It announces that this whole thing is about Jesus and dependent on Jesus. The good news is the declaration of his victory for us, not our “victorious Christian life.” The gospel asserts that God’s final word over a Christian has already been spoken: “Paid in full.”

There are four books I’ve re-read a few times in the last two years: Living by Grace by William Hordern, The Hammer of God by Bo Giertz, Who Will Deliver Us? by Paul Zahl, and Sanctification by Harold Senkbeil. All four of those books have been extremely helpful to me personally and theologically. They’ve helped me better understand my sin, God’s grace, and the distinction between the law and the gospel. They’ve guided me through deep and wide pastoral challenges and, I think, made me a better preacher, pastor, and counselor.

What are your favorite fiction books?

I’m not a huge reader of fiction. I consider that to be a weakness in my reading habits, not a strength. I would strongly encourage readers of theology to increase their reading of fiction. When our reading habits become one-dimensional, our thinking becomes one-dimensional. But three fiction books that have profoundly influenced me are Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, The Hammer of God by Bo Giertz, and The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis.

This is the final post of a three part series on the Holy Spirit – the one who is a conveyor of truth, a creator out of nothing, and a comforter of the afflicted.

The Comforter of the Afflicted

In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (John 14:25-27). Jesus promises both the coming of the Advocate—who will remind them of the truth—and the gift of peace. Jesus’ twin promise is not a haphazard construction of thoughts, awkwardly joined together; the two are inextricably linked.

The truth – what Christ has done for us, that death has been defeated, that pain, sorrow, and suffering have been sentenced to death by His death and resurrection – is the source from which peace springs. The Holy Spirit is the Comforter, both conveying the truth of God’s mighty deeds to us, and recreating us by his presence in our hearts. He speaks comfort by telling us about Jesus, the one who said “Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

It is in our dark moments that the Spirit calls us, whispering to us and guiding us to the truth of Jesus Christ and his fulfillment of promises. When we, the down-trodden, the beat-up, the heavy-laden, the grieving, and the sorrowful throw in the towel and give up, it is the Spirit that revives faith and hope the next morning. It is the Spirit who protects the bruised reed, and it is the Spirit who won’t let the sputtering flame go out.

As life reduces the spring in our step to a limp, the Spirit swoops in, cradles us in His arms and carries us, proclaiming all the while the comforting words of God’s great love for us, true yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Christians are sometimes thought of as “different,” but it is only due to the presence of the Advocate (the Comforter) that this is true: Our difference is found in our hope. For the Christian, who lives their life in a world full of chaos, anxiety, and hopelessness, hope springs eternal because its source is an eternal God—the Holy Spirit. In the same way, peace reigns because its source reigns in our hearts—the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

In her book The Jesus Story Book Bible, Sally Lloyd-Jones closes the story about the day of Pentecost like this:

And Peter told them the wonderful Story of God’s Love—God’s Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love….They couldn’t speak the same language but as they listened to Peter, everyone could understand what he was saying—in their own languages! Many people believed. And became Jesus’ new friends and helpers. And the wonderful news of Jesus spread. Like sparks from a fire. To villages. Towns. Cities. Every day, more and more people believed. And so it was that the family of God’s children, his special people grew. One man was watching. ‘I’ll stop this!’ Saul said. But this was God’s plan. And nothing in all the world would ever be able to stop it.

Nothing can stop God’s movement toward his people. No one can silence the dynamic activity of the Spirit. The truth will always be conveyed, life will always be brought out of death, and comfort will always be given to God’s people. The Holy Spirit is alive, and here.

This is not so much a video about why God allows suffering or even how we should approach suffering—it is a video about the tremendously liberating and gloriously counterintuitive truth of a God who suffers with you and for you. It is a video, in other words, about the kind of hope that takes the shape of a cross.

Watch the trailer below and then order the Leader Kit from Lifeway.

Glorious Ruin Promo from Kyle Lollis on Vimeo.

I love the way Philip Yancey describes the discrepancy between our instincts and God’s instincts in his book What’s So Amazing About Grace?

By instinct I feel I must do something in order to be accepted. Grace sounds a startling note of contradiction, of liberation, and every day I must pray anew for the ability to hear its message.

Eugene Peterson draws a contrast between Augustine and Pelagius, two fourth-century theological opponents. Pelagius was urbane, courteous, convincing, and liked by everyone. Augustine squandered away his youth in immorality, had a strange relationship with his mother, and made many enemies. Yet Augustine started from God’s grace and got it right, whereas Pelagius started from human effort and got it wrong. Augustine passionately pursued God; Pelagius methodically worked to please God. Peterson goes on to say that Christians tend to be Augustinian in theory but Pelagian in practice. They work obsessively to please other people and even God.

Each year in spring, I fall victim to what the sports announcers diagnose as “March Madness.” I cannot resist the temptation to tune in to the final basketball game, in which the sole survivors of a sixty-four-team tournament meet for the NCAA championship. That most important game always seems to come down to one eighteen-year-old kid standing on a freethrow line with one second left on the clock. He dribbles nervously. If he misses these two foul shots, he knows, he will be the goat of his campus, the goat of his state. Twenty years from now he’ll be in counseling, reliving this moment. If he makes these shots, he’ll be a hero. His picture will be on the front page. He could probably run for governor. He takes another dribble and the other team calls time, to rattle him. He stands on the sideline, weighing his entire future. Everything depends on him. His teammates pat him encouragingly, but say nothing.

One year, I remember, I left the room to answer a phone call just as the kid was setting himself to shoot. Worry lines creased his forehead. He was biting his lower lip. His left leg quivered at the knee. Twenty thousand fans were yelling, waving banners and handkerchiefs to distract him. The phone call took longer than expected, and when I returned I saw a new sight. This same kid, his hair drenched with Gatorade, was now riding atop the shoulders of his teammates, cutting the cords of a basketball net. He had not a care in the world. His grin filled the entire screen.

Those two freeze-frames—the same kid crouching at the free throw line and then celebrating on his friends’ shoulders—came to symbolize for me the difference between ungrace and grace.

The world runs by ungrace. Everything depends on what I do. I have to make the shot.

Jesus calls us to another way, one that depends not on our performance but his own. We do not have to achieve but merely follow. He has already earned for us the costly victory of God’s acceptance.

The interaction between Jesus and Zacchaeus is so well-known to Christian people that we’ve made up a silly song about it (“Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he…”). In this case, that song isn’t the only problem with the story being so familiar; another problem is that, because we know the particulars so well, we miss the profundity completely.The story of Zacchaeus and Jesus is a powerful portrait of both Jesus’ extension of undeserved grace and of a forgiven sinner’s expression of unrequired obedience.

It’s easy to forget that Zacchaeus would have been a double-outcast in his time: hated by the Jews for collecting taxes for the oppressive Roman Empire, and hated as a Jew by his Roman employers. It’s safe to say, in other words, that Zacchaeus was likely not suffering from an overabundance of friends. Who knows when the last time (before hosting the Savior of the World) Zacchaeus had entertained a guest in his home?

Everyone knows the story: Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector (which means that even the other tax collectors didn’t like him – he was skimming extra money for himself off of their hard-won, pre-skimmed earnings), was a small man, and so had to climb a sycamore tree to see Jesus as he passed by on the road. Jesus, out of the large crowd that would have been following him, picked Zacchaeus out and said, “I must stay at your house today” (Luke 19:5). Not, “If you shape up, I’d be willing to spend some time with you.” Not, “If you clean up your act, I’ll grace your home with my presence.” Jesus was compelled to be with Zacchaeus.

Jesus is compelled to be with sinners…it’s why he came. In Zacchaeus’ home, he says, “Today salvation has come to this house…for the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

The crowd, of course, is very disappointed in Jesus. “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner,” they mutter. Reading this passage now, as “mature” Sunday-schooled Christians, we know that the crowd is in the wrong. “How could they misunderstand Jesus so completely?” we think. “How can they be so mean to Zacchaeus?” We forget how nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying it is for us when someone in our lives gets something they don’t deserve or avoids some penalty that they do deserve. “That’s not fair!” we cry. We are just like that crowd surrounding Zacchaeus, despite our protestations to the contrary.

Perhaps the most powerful thing in this passage, though, is Zacchaeus’ response to Jesus once the Savior is in his home. He says, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” His obedience flows naturally from him the moment Jesus enters his life. Jesus never tells him what to do. Just as Jesus doesn’t require a changed heart or lifestyle to enter his home, he doesn’t then demand charity and reparations (“Now that you’re a Christian, Zacchaeus…”). The Gospel, God’s one-way love for sinners, creates what the Law, God’s holy standard, can only require. And it creates more!

Zacchaeus goes above and beyond the call of duty, promising to give a half of his possessions to the poor, and promising to repay anyone he had defrauded four times the amount owed. No doubt, Zacchaeus had been told many times what the law required, but hadn’t moved an inch to follow it. Faced with the power of God’s one-way, undeserved love for broken, sinful people, though? Zacchaeus pledges to do more, happily, than the law ever would have asked of him.

What we see here (and in our lives) is that love inspires what the Law demands—the Law prescribes good works, but only grace can produce them. Gratitude, generosity, honesty, compassion, acts of mercy and self-sacrifice (all rquirements of the law) spring unsummoned from a forgiven heart. By definition, good works can’t be forced or coerced: they’re instinctive, reflexive, spontaneous. What’s so obvious in this story is that works of love flow spontaneously from the one who hears and believes God’s final “I Love You”–a love that has no strings attached.

Jesus impacts Zacchaeus in two amazing ways: both examples of God’s amazing grace. First, Zacchaeus’ joyful charity is not the preface to God’s grace, it is its result. Jesus extends grace to a terrible sinner, before that sinner repents (it is grace, after all, that produces change—not the other way around). Second, that undeserved grace creates a new life of unrequired obedience, bringing forth more “good works” than any laying down of the law ever could.

This is how God works on us. He picks us, the least deserving, out of the crowd, insists upon being in a relationship with us, and creates in us a new heart, miraculously capable of pleasing Him. Hallelujah! What a savior!

Knox Theological Seminary has launched The New City Catechism Project, a video series featuring Dr. Michael Allen, Kennedy Professor of Systematic Theology and Dean of Faculty. Developed by Dr. Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, The New City Catechism consists of fifty-two questions and answers adapted from the four great catechisms of the Reformed tradition: Calvin’s Geneva Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Larger Catechism, and the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Each week we will feature one question and answer from Dr. Allen’s series.

Watch Question #11: What does God require in the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments?

Pictures of Grace – Chris Crawford from Coral Ridge | LIBERATE on Vimeo.

We often read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our triumph, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness. We treat it like a book of timeless principles that will give us our best life now if we simply apply those principles. We treat it, in other words, like it’s a heaven-sent self-help manual. But by looking at the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us, we totally miss the point — like the two on the road to Emmaus. As Luke 24 shows, it’s possible to read the Bible, study the Bible, and memorize large portions of the Bible while missing the whole point of the Bible. It’s entirely possible, in other words, to read the stories and miss the Story. In fact, unless we go to the Bible to see Jesus and his work for us, even our devout Bible reading can become fuel for our own narcissistic self-improvement plans, the place we go for the help we need to “conquer today’s challenges and take control of our lives.”

Contrary to popular assumptions, the Bible is not a record of the blessed good, but rather the blessed bad. That’s not a typo. The Bible is a record of the blessed bad. The Bible is not a witness to the best people making it up to God; it’s a witness to God making it down to the worst people. Far from being a book full of moral heroes to emulate, what we discover is that the so-called heroes in the Bible are not really heroes at all. They fall and fail, they make huge mistakes, they get afraid, their selfish, deceptive, egotistical, and unreliable. The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with his rescue; our sin with his salvation; our failure with his favor; our guilt with his grace; our badness with his goodness.

So, if we read the Bible asking first, “What would Jesus do?” instead of asking “What has Jesus done” we’ll miss the good news that alone can set us free.

As I’ve said before, the overwhelming focus of the Bible is not the work of the redeemed but the work of the Redeemer. Which means that the Bible is not first a recipe book for Christian living, but a revelation book of Jesus who is the answer to our unchristian living.