www.rawchristianity.com is the home of my new blog.  I've been working on it off and on since July and have finally decided to launch it despite the fact that there are still things I'd like to add to it.  My first post is here.

I'm going to miss being a part of the TMC blogring, and I'm also going to miss my dark-blue background and simple template that have become so familiar to me.  But I won't miss the advertisements at the top of the page or the requirement that you sign up with Xanga before commenting.

For those of you who have the handy Xanga subscription, that's not going to work anymore because I won't be posting here anymore.  You can do an RSS feed, though, which I know almost nothing about except that you can do it with my new blog and that it's supposedly simple.

For those of you who have a link from your site to mine, I would appreciate it if you would change the address of that link so that it's up-to-date.

For those of you who hate change and therefore will never read the new blog, thanks for reading and (maybe) commenting over the last few years here.  I pray that you will never walk away from the Lord but will always run toward Him.

I don't know how you're supposed to shut down an old blog, but there are some last words that come to mind that are better than any last words I could write.  So I leave you with the grey-haired Apostle John, the one whom Jesus loved, with hope that this will be your abiding passion and your constant prayer until the Lord comes again.

He who testifies to these things says, 'Yes, I am coming quickly.'  Amen.  Come, Lord Jesus.  The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all.  Amen.   - Revelation 22:20-21

During his recent sabbatical in Cambridge, John Piper wrote a new book entitled What Jesus Demands from the World.  He spent almost three months huddling under the interrogating light of Jesus' commands in the gospels, and then wrote what he learned.  This past Friday night at the DesiringGod National Conference, he was asked how this process affected him (the complete Q&A session is here).  I've transcribed the interchange:

Justin Taylor to John Piper:  Pastor John, I wanted to start with you… You spent two months this summer looking at the commands of Jesus in the gospels and poring over every word that Jesus said, and I want to ask you:  In this postmodern climate, in today’s culture, what did that do for your own soul, spending that much time with the words of Christ?  Anything personally that you learned, that you took away from that time, or were you changed by doing that exercise?

John Piper:  It’s a devastating thing, first, to expose yourself to five hundred imperatives in the gospels and dozens and dozens of demands from the one who has all authority in heaven and on earth, because His standards are so radical, meaning they go to the root of all your behaviors.  He’s not concerned primarily with what’s on the outside, but He’s always pressing down into the bottom—“unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees” (and their problem was that they were whitewashed tombs).  And so, it was always going deep.  So it was eleven weeks or so of having my heart exposed to its anger or its impatience or its unforgiveness, and clamoring then for the second impression, namely, “the Son of Man came into the world not to be served but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many;” “I didn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners.”  So you have this radical demand running side by side with these spectacular offers of mercy for those who will be the publican and despair of [their] own righteousness instead of the Pharisee who’s thanking God that he’s worked any righteousness and is going to bank on it in the judgment day.  So there was hope and there was desolation, and if I understand the gospels right, that’s the way it’s supposed to happen.

I think the personal effect was to intensify my desire to be in the face of a pluralistic world and say as publicly and as provocatively as I can that all authority in the universe belongs to Jesus Christ.  It doesn’t belong to Mohammed and it doesn’t belong to any Hindu god and it doesn’t belong to Moses.  It belongs to Jesus Christ, and if you don’t bow the knee to Him, you will perish.  And so we need to proclaim that God is angry at the whole world—if you don’t obey the Son, the wrath of God rests on you.  And so there was just a sense that there’s so much mealy-mouthed hesitancy to talk about the most important things in the world, namely, getting right with a holy God who will crush you forever if you don’t go to the Son that He provided.

I just came away feeling like I just don’t want to play games anymore.  Life is short; I don’t know how long I have.

Jesus, as He stands forth in the gospels, is spectacularly supreme and beautiful and glorious and tough and tender and worthy and attractive and satisfying—why wouldn’t you want to give your life to this?

Quotes are from Matthew 5:20, 20:28, and 9:13.

This is a long post.  That’s probably not surprising to you.  But this one is especially long.  I think that’s because it’s about the lifelong outworking of God’s sovereignty in my life, which by nature has to include a lot of details.  Whether or not you should keep reading depends on what your priorities and responsibilities are today and the amount of time you have to do what God has for you.  But there is a point, just so you know.  And that point is very meaningful to me right now.

While I was driving home from seminary on Friday morning, I called my good friend Cameron Knox.  Cameron was leading an Outreach Week team to Bear Valley Springs Community Church in Tehachapi, California.  I spoke at their high school camp this summer on four of the most radical sayings of Jesus.  I wanted to know how the week was going and how I could pray.  Cameron gave me a brief update, and then gave me the encouraging news that a few of the high school students that were at summer camp had expressed how God impacted them during our week together.  This was obviously a delight for me to hear.  But then Cameron pointed out something else to me.  He said that he was excited to hear the news, too, because he remembered the email that I sent out to the Oak Manor Servant Leadership Staff this summer asking them to pray for the Lord to work through my preaching at camp.  He had prayed—in July, in New York—and now he was seeing—in October, in California—how God answered those prayers.  I knew that Cameron was leading the Outreach Week team to Tehachapi, but I had forgotten that I had sent that email this summer, that Cameron had received it and had prayed according to my requests, and that he was now going to have the amazing opportunity to see in person what God had done.  I ended the phone call by telling Cameron that I would now pray for him as he ministered in Tehachapi.  We were both well aware that these prayers meant something.  They meant something because God is sovereignly weaving together a redemptive tapestry that is seen most often in hindsight.

Saturday night I led some singing (in Spanish) at the inaugural Bible study that is designed to kick off Placerita Baptist Church’s Hispanic church plant.  Steve and Karen Borders, ABWE missionaries, are the main church planters.  They asked me to play the guitar for them because (1) I go to PBC, (2) I play the guitar, and (3) I’ve basically been part of their family from my earliest years in college.  I arrived fifteen minutes early and Karen quickly taught me three songs in Spanish.  One was “Jesus Loves Me,” so that one wasn’t difficult, but it was a challenge to learn two brand-new songs in a different language right before leading a group in singing them.  Of course, Karen co-led the singing with me (actually, I co-led with her) and made things go quite smoothly.  As I was standing in front of the seed form of this Hispanic church plant singing next to Karen Borders (her son was my roommate in college and the best man in my wedding) and looking at her husband Steve Borders (a church planter for decades), I was once again amazed at the sovereignty of God.  I met their son Ben in 1998 when I was a freshman and he was a high school senior visiting the wing I was on in Slight Dorm.  We were roommates my sophomore year, fellow staff members my junior year, best friends through our senior years, and in each other’s weddings in the years following college.  I spent numerous weekends and holidays at his family’s house, and his three sisters are the closest I’ve ever gotten to actually having a sister myself.  So as I stood next to his parents playing the guitar and praising God in Spanish and playing a tiny role in helping plant a desperately-needed church, I caught another glimpse of God’s incredible sovereignty.  All I had to do was rewind the tape of my life and watch it in slow motion.  God had been doing stunningly intricate things all along.

Sunday afternoon Cindi and I drove down to Westside Bible Church in Los Angeles to see our dear friend Anthony Kidd installed as senior pastor.  I first met the WBC body my freshman year (1998) when I went there for Outreach Week.  Four years later, Cindi and I were seniors at TMC and wanted to attend an inner-city, international, or ethnic church for a year.  After racking my brain and asking for references for a few weeks, I remembered Westside (predominantly black).  I went to my files and found a bulletin from the Sunday I was there for Outreach Week.  I called the number on it, one thing led to another, and we ended up attending there for one delightful year.  We grew so close to the Kidd family and we respected them so much that we asked them to do our pre-marital counseling.  Both Anthony and his wife were in our wedding, as well.  Then on Sunday, we saw Anthony commissioned to the highest of callings—to serve as an undershepherd of the church that Jesus Christ purchased with His own blood.  On the drive home, Cindi and I agreed that when we leave California, the Kidd’s are some of the people that we will miss the most.  That we have known them and been blessed by them over the past five years is a grace that we could never have predicted or brought to pass.  But God in His good pleasure has done so, orchestrating the melody of His perfect will and the harmony of designed circumstances and the cacophony of trials into a sovereign symphony which has brought delight and strength to every generation of His people.

If you run in the theological circles that I run in, you’re well aware that the sovereignty of God is spoken of well and often.  And so it should be.  God is gloriously sovereign, to such an extent that this sovereignty rules every detail of life.  Furthermore, one of the most blessed things about being a new creation in Christ is that we can actually see this sovereignty played out in day-to-day details.  This doesn’t mean that my experience and observation of God’s overarching control are what define the doctrine.  But it does mean that I have the eyes to see the beauty of the outworking of God’s eternal plan every day.  That is a great blessing.  It also means that the longer I live and the more I watch Him unfold His plan for my life, the more I am convinced that His supreme reign and His good pleasure are truly being fulfilled, and that because I am in Christ by the grace of God, the fulfillment of His plan is working for my good.

There is one last situation: Judah.  His adoption has been a long process.  We started in January, and things moved quickly.  Then they slowed down.  We thought we’d get his birth certificate in mid-spring.  We got it in July.  We thought we might get to pick him up as early as June.  Now December would be a miracle.  We thought our final application would go through smoothly.  It was put on hold.  We thought we’d get him a few months before his first birthday.  We’re now expecting him to be walking and maybe talking by the time we see him for the first time.  Our baby room is decorated, but it’s empty and silent.  Applications are on hold, government officials are holding out for bribes, deadlines are looming, court dates (for other couples trying to pick up their children) are being consistently delayed, and one wife and mother has been in Uganda since March waiting for a court date that was first scheduled seven months ago.  Things are not going according to plan.

Or are they?

Every day we wake up with a choice: a choice to live by faith or to live by sight.  A choice between what we see and what we know.  A choice between a persuasive appearance and a concrete reality.  This choice is simple, but it’s not easy.  Sometimes it’s easy, when faith and sight match up: God is good, and we feel good.  But often it’s not, because often we don’t feel good.  Often God wraps the black blindfold of uncertainty around our heads, cinches it tight, and says, “Walk… and smile… and sing.”  Is He cruel to do so?  Only to the man who trusts in himself and wants to be comfortable more than he wants to be spiritual.  But the man who knows God and who knows himself knows that God only blindfolds His children because the place He wants them to go is so beautiful that He will do anything to get them there, and sometimes the path is hard enough that they might not walk it if they could see it.  But both are in God’s perfect plan: the path, and the destination.

Things are always going according to plan.  Not just in hindsight, and not just in heaven.  The question is which blueprint you’re looking at, whose map you’re following, and whether or not you’re willing to walk with a blindfold… and smile… and sing.

Tonight I find myself honestly wondering when the word "preach" became a Christian cuss word.  As in, "We shouldn't preach at people; we should just love them."  Or, "I just want to talk; I don't want to preach at you."  Or, "Yeah, nobody really likes him; he just preaches at people."

I've used the word in this kind of way all the time, and I know what we mean by it when we use it this way.  So I'm not saying that I don't understand why we use it this way or that I'm not sure what we're trying to communicate.  I'm not even saying that I frown on using the word "preach" in a negative context.

But I do think that it's dangerous if we never think about it.  Love, grace, mercy, compassion, understanding, listening, gentleness, and meekness have everything to do with following Christ and being His ambassadors.  Scripture is replete with examples of God's tenderness and compassion as well as exhortations for us to reflect Him in these things.  But it's also chock-full of preaching.  In fact, the entire book is one massive story designed to "preach" to a world full of sinners about the wickedness of our hearts, the error of our ways, the destiny of those who turn their backs on God, and the glory of free salvation in Jesus Christ.  It tells us what's real, not just what we want to hear.  And the God who wrote it did so because He loves us.

He loves us so much that in His Book there are fire-and-brimstone prophets, mind-blowing judgments, sermons from cover to cover, toe-to-toe confrontations, and a lot of things said that stop us dead in our tracks and, unless our hearts are changed, make us very, very mad at God for saying them.

I think we need to be careful not to let the world define our words for us.  Don't buy into the notion that "preaching" is bad and "love" is good.  They're not antithetical to each other.  Yes, of course it's unloving for someone to preach the truth to someone without a spirit of love.  But it's unloving because it's unloving.  It's not unloving because it's preaching.  And it's equally unloving to love someone without preaching the truth to them.  If you love someone but don't tell them the truth that they need to hear, you're not really loving them.  You're probably loving yourself.  You're loving yourself so much that you'd rather maintain a comfortable relationship with them and keep their mind and emotions at ease than inform them of the truth that will save their lives.

I believe wholeheartedly in personal relationships and in loving, patient evangelism and in gentle, unhypocritical presentations of the truth.  I think there a lot of ways to "preach at people" that are very uncaring, very cold, and very wrong.  But I don't want to pendulum-swing to the other side and condemn "preaching" and castigate truth-telling and advocate a procrastinating, soppy, flimsy method of evangelizing and exhortation that "loves" and "listens" people all the way into hell.

I want to do both.  I want to love people and I want to tell them the truth.  I want to meet their tangible needs and weep with them and listen to them pour out the aches of their hearts, and I also want to speak an honest, sincere, straightforward, unwavering message of truth that can only heal as it wounds.

If I claim to follow Jesus, I don't think that I can pick one or the other.  Because Jesus didn't leave me a choice between the two.

The guy RD's decided to hike Half-Dome in Yosemite this weekend (Jeff Lewis, Dave Hulet, Siona Savini, and I).  The only other time I was in Yosemite is long enough ago for me not to remember anything about it.  I'll certainly remember this time, though.

The hike was 15.2 miles roundtrip.  We gained around 4,800 feet in elevation (Half-Dome itself is around 8,850 feet).  We camped in Yosemite Valley on Friday night, had an absolutely incredible Hobo dinner (tri-tip, potatoes, onions, and carrots all sliced up and grilled in tin foil on a campfire, then mixed together), packed everything with a scent into the bear lockers for the night, woke up at 5:30am, packed up, and hit the trail at 7:00am.  We summitted at around 1:00 or 1:30pm, enjoyed the view for about an hour, then headed back down.  We took a steeper shortcut on the way back and were at our car around 6:30pm.  We got back to TMC at precisely 11:59pm (the exact time that Jeff had predicted at our trip-planning meeting last Tuesday night).  On the hike I drank 80 ounces of water and actually gorged myself sick on dry fruit, strawberry Nutri Grain bars, a few gummy worms, and Italian dry salami with Tillamook cheddar at the top.  I kept wanting to eat and thought I would need it since we were expending so much energy, but I ended up feeling sick the whole way down and didn't eat anything between 2:00 and 10:30pm.

This is what we saw upon exiting the tunnel into Yosemite Valley (Half-Dome is the half-dome at the very end of the valley):

The trees were big, strong, and beautiful.

Jeff wanted to make sure we knew exactly where we were headed.  He's pointing at the "Diving Board."

The face of Half-Dome glows when the sun sets on the west side of the valley.

Ona got thirsty on the way up, but the Lord provided water out of a rock.  Dave was going to hit it a few times, but I told him not to.  "Dude, haven't you read your Old Testament?"

This is Half-Dome from the east side.  We couldn't figure out why they call it "Half-Dome."  The little guy you see at very top isn't actually a little guy.  He's a normal-sized person on a huge rock.  The reason I know he's not a little guy is because of the trail of equally-little people on the left side of the picture.  This rock is no joke.

It didn't matter, though.  Ona was hardcore and ready to do it.

So up we went, along with a horde of other people.  It felt like some sort of pilgrimage.

Yes, those are cables, and no, it doesn't feel entirely safe going up.  It's not an exaggeration to say that if you slip and fall, you are definitely going to die.  We tried hard not to do that.

We made it to the top by God's grace.  Here we are on the Diving Board.  Notice my strategic position in this particular picture.

The reason my position was strategic is that this is where we were standing (no, I didn't fall off; I'm the one taking the picture):

We had quite a view.  If the creation reflects the power and artistry of its Maker, we can know at least two things: God is not small, and He is not unskilled.  This is why it is not foolish or unfair to believe that there are no absolute atheists (Romans 1:19-20).

The vertical drop is about 4,400 feet along the northwest face.  This didn't bother Jeff, though.  Jeff actually eats fear for breakfast.  Meanwhile, Dave (top left) decided to pose for his senior picture.

We thought Jeff (top) was pretty courageous until we saw these guys (bottom):

They're from Germany.  We thought they were so cool we got a picture with them.  I bet they thought we were pretty cool, too.  I mean, the difference between hiking the backside of Half-Dome and climbing the face isn't really that different.  I don't know why they needed those ropes.  I think they were just showing off.

The hour we spent at the top went by quickly, but that didn't make it less glorious.  When we started down the cables, Jeff wasn't happy that he had to wait in line and Ona was hoping for more water to come out of the rock.  I was just trying to get the picture taken so I could put my gloves back on and grab the cables again.

These guys that I work with are genuinely awesome.  The bond we share is deep, and the ministry that has brought us together is filled with joy.  We all had an amazing time, and I can't think of a more refreshing way to spend 36 hours of a mid-semester weekend.  The fellowship and conversations were encouraging and insightful, the creation was chattering non-stop about the glory and wonder of its Creator, the hike was hard and rewarding, and the spiritual lessons could fill more than a few pages in each of our journals.

I'll just share one of those lessons.  I took this last picture from the summit with this verse in mind: