This is the seventeenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, sanctification, incarnation, and idolatry.

Wayne Grudem says it simply and well: “The church is the community of all true believers for all time.“ The church (Greek ekklesia) is the term used in the New Testament to refer to those who, through faith in the work of Christ, have been united together as one body, an eternal community that transcends time and place and that will one day share perfect fellowship with God forever.

Not only are these people united to one another, but they are united to Christ himself, who is the head of the body (Ephesians 1:22-23; 5:23). Or, to use the marriage analogy Paul introduces in this letter to the Christians at Ephesus, Christ is the husband in the one-flesh relationship between himself and his bride, the church (5:31-32).

This is the global sense of the term church which is used primarily in Ephesians and a few other places in the New Testament (e. g. Matthew 16:18 “on this rock I will build my church”). However, the bulk of the New Testament references to church refer to this community of Christ as it exists in its multiple, diverse, local expressions throughout the world. Paul begins several of his letters, “To the church of God that is in Corinth” or “To the church of the Thessalonians.” And the book of Revelation contains messages to seven particular Christian communities or churches (Revelation 2:1-3:22). So we are right to refer to all Christians as the church and we are right to refer to our local gatherings as churches.

That you belong to the global church implies that you will belong to and be actively involved in a local church as well, for, as Hebrews suggests, your faith and obedience depend on it:

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:23-25)

While I’ve always been an avid reader of books, in the past twelve months or so I’ve also become an avid listener. After seeing hundreds of Audible ads advertising “Download a Free Audiobook Today!” I finally went ahead and signed up and downloaded my free audiobook (and yes, you actually can join, get that free audiobook, and quit the program within fourteen days). There has been no looking back and I’ve become a bona fide lover of audiobooks. I listen while commuting, while doing dishes, and in that time when I’m too tired to read and but not tired enough to go to bed.

Here are a few of the books I’ve listened to in the past few months.

Washington by Ron Chernow

One of my long-term projects is to read (or listen to) a biography of each of the American presidents. Chernow’s Washington: A Life is a brilliant account of the life of George Washington. It represents 42 hours of listening, but it didn’t ever grow the least bit dull. There are two aspects to the life of the first President that stood out to me more than anything else. The first was the unexpected interplay between Washington’s pride and humility. Though he was a proud man—vain even—he was also motivated by higher ideals than self. So even while he was desirious of having power, he was willing to give it up. He is the one man in American history (the one man in human history, perhaps) who has had access to complete military power and complete political power and who has willingly given up both. That is remarkable. The other aspect of his life that stood out to me was the deep sadness of his wife. Both of the Washington’s wanted to live a quiet country life, and yet time and time again duty came calling, taking George away. Martha lived with constant sadness that she and her husband spent so much time apart. Her life displays just some of the sadness of life in a fallen world. (Buy it at Amazon or Audible)

Truman by David McCullough

As I continue to work my way through the presidents, I knew I wanted to move quickly to Truman since it collides with another of my projects—working my way through all of David McCullough’s books. McCullough’s biography is considered the definitive work and I can’t see how it will ever be equalled. Even longer than Washington, Truman clocks in at 54 hours, but is fascinating from beginning to end. To give a sense of the value of reading this biography, I’ll refer you to an article my mother wrote after she read it for the second time: My Favorite New Deal Mason. Here’s a key quote from that review: “I think Truman's fundamental weakness was his misunderstanding of human nature. He was a committed humanist and had no category for entrenched personal evil. This influenced many of his decisions in a way that has proven counter-productive over the long term.” (Buy it at Amazon or Audible)

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Through much of 2012 I had seen Behind the Beautiful Forevers on various lists of bestselling books, but it wasn’t until I returned from a week in India that I decided to pick it up. I’m glad I did. Boo spent three years in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum community. In this book she relates her experience there and tells about the lives of the people who live in that slum. I guess you might term this “narrative non-fiction” and it is very well done. She aptly highlights the despair of people who are victims of their circumstances and victims of the systemic corruption that plagues modern-day India. The contrast between rich and poor, between the haves and the have-nots, is stark and startling, the characters unforgettable, the stories tragic. (Buy it at Amazon or Audible)

Killing Kennedy by Bill O’Reilly

Killing Kennedy is the follow-up to O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln. (Because of its narrow focus, it does not count toward my presidential biography project) Both books made their way to the New York Times list of bestsellers and are there still. Killing Kennedy is a short, punchy account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It avoids swinging into conspiracy theory territory and simply recounts the facts as the history books have recorded them. It is fast-paced and well-told. Unfortunately it also has rather a “tabloid” feel. While no account of Kennedy’s life can be told without referring to his wild, unrepentant philandering, O’Reilly dwells there for a little bit too long, especially considering that this is an account of his death more than his life. There is no good reason for it, except that it is lascivious and, therefore, captivating. This book may still be worth listening to if you want to better understand one of America’s defining moments, but do be aware of that unfortunate secondary emphasis. (Buy it at Amazon or Audible)

Columbine by Dave Cullen

I listened to Columbine this summer, long before the tragedy in Newtown. Somehow recent events have made the shootings at Columbine High School seem even more tragic. Years after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered one teacher and twelve of their fellow students, Cullen assembled the facts and did his utmost to separate truth from error and fact from fiction. The book’s editorial description says it well: “Over the course of this gripping narrative, Dave Cullen approaches his subjects with unrivaled care and insight. What emerges are shattering portraits of the killers, the victims, and the community that suffered one of the greatest—and most socially and historically important—shooting tragedies of the 20th century.” One of the greatest lessons may be that it will take years before we can really know what happened at Newtown, Connecticut. It will take that long for the reports to be gathered and filtered. In the end, much of what we think we know will be corrected. (Buy it at Amazon or Audible)

This is the seventeenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, sanctification and incarnation.

“For what is idolatry if not this: to worship the gifts in place of the giver himself?” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.17.36) Calvin summarizes well what it means to commit idolatry. Idolatry may well be in full view in the days to come as so many of us make our New Year’s resolutions. Do we make these resolutions because we want to honor God? Or are we resolving to do things that make us feel better about the idols we worship? Losing weight may be a noble goal, but not if we want to lose weight for all the wrong reasons.

The clearest places we see idolatry defined in Scripture are in two similar passages from Paul’s epistles:

For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. (Ephesians 5:5)

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. (Colossians 3:5)

In both of these passages, idolatry is used synonymously with covetousness. The Greek word behind covetousness (pleonexia) is defined as “the state of desiring to have more than one’s due,” which is to say that a covetous person is not content with what they’ve been alloted by God--including God himself--and so they are constantly looking elsewhere for their satisfaction. Does that sound at all familiar?

This means that idolatry is the same as covetousness in the sense that, as people remain (or become) discontent with who God is and what he has done for them, they look elsewhere for satisfaction. They divert their eyes from the Giver and look to his gifts for their fulfillment. This can include all sorts of physical pleasures, none of which is inherently bad—food, sex, exercise—as well as intangible things like ambition, productivity, learning, and social acceptance. As Tim Keller has taught us, anything can be, and everything has been, an idol.

The lesson for us in these, the final days of an old year, is to choose our New Year’s resolutions carefully and biblically.

Let me allow you in to a little secret of the blogosphere: The week between Christmas and New Years is the slowest week of the year for site visits. We are all busy and distracted and otherwise out of our routines, so traffic to blogs plummets to a mere forty or fifty percent of the usual. For that reason you’ll find many bloggers treading water, so to speak. Instead of investing a whole lot of effort in articles and series that will be missed by so many readers, they create lists and other lesser forms of content. For example, they might provide a round-up of the top stories at their blog from the previous year.

Speaking of which, I recently looked at the top articles of 2012 and was really surprised by what bubbled to the top. So here they are, as rated by the simple metric of page views, a measure of how many people pulled up the various pages in their browsers.

Heaven Is For Real - Heaven Is For Real continues to sell, though two or three of the competing “I went to heaven” books have given it some stiff competition in the genre.

Jesus Calling - Though my review of Sarah Young’s Jesus Calling was written in mid-2011, it continued to be read in 2012.

In Which I Ask Ann Voskamp’s Forgiveness - My review of Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts (#5 on this list) provides the context for this follow-up article.

Smilingly Leading You to Hell - Here’s one that I chewed over for months before finally posting it. It suggests that the attribute of “niceness” is a-biblical and massively over-rated.

Competitive Mothering - This article from May struck a nerve, though I can’t remember if it was a good or bad one.

One Thousand Gifts - My review of Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts takes the #5 spot for the year.

I Looked For Love In Your Eyes - This is an older article, a sad poem looking at the effects of pornography, that received some attention last year.

Visual Theology - My series of Visual Theology infographics caught on. I will group several of them together here, though they were the #3, #4 and #5 pages: The Order of Salvation, The Books of the Bible, The Attributes of God.

Real Marriage - I considered Real Marriage by Mark and Grace Driscoll a very disappointing book on marriage and critiqued it for much of what it teaches about sex.

Created To Be His Helpmeet - As I pulled up the list of this year’s most-read articles, I was very surprised to see this as the most-read. This review of Debi Pearl’s book on being a wife—an offensive and mean-spirited book that goes far beyond what Scripture teaches—must have resonated with others.

I guess the big takeaway here is that book reviews continue to lead the way. More specifically, critical reviews of popular books continue to lead the way. Not only that, but even the articles that were not book reviews, were in some way related to controversy (with the exception of Visual Theology). Clearly controversy sells, and people look to the blogosphere to help them sort through the compelling issues.

This is the sixteenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, adoption, and sanctification.

We sing joy to the world at Christmas, says Spurgeon, “because it is evermore a joyous fact that God should be in alliance with man, especially when the alliance is so near that God should in very deed take our manhood into union with his godhead; so that God and man should constitute one divine, mysterious person” (see “Joy Born at Bethlehem”).

This is what Christians mean when we speak of the Incarnation: the joining together of God and man in “one divine, mysterious person,” the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Incarnation is an especially joyful and important doctrine for Christians because, not only did God align with man, but through this alignment Jesus gained a human body that could in turn be sacrificed to endure God’s wrath. This was the only way that man could be saved. As Spurgeon explains,

Sin had separated between God and man; but the incarnation bridges the separation: it is a prelude to the atoning sacrifice, but it is a prelude full of the richest hope. From henceforth, when God looks upon man, he will remember that his own Son is a man. From this day forth, when he beholds the sinner, if his wrath should burn, he will remember that his own Son, as man, stood in the sinner’s place, and bore the sinner’s doom.

When we understand the purpose for which Jesus was incarnated, we can bring a much greater depth to our Christmas singing. We can sing carols like “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” with newfound wonder and worship as we consider the nature of the newborn Jesus, and the purpose for which he came:

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see;
Hail th’incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus our Immanuel…

Mild he lays his glory by,
born that man no more may die,
born to raise the sons of earth,
born to give us second birth.
Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the new born King!”

If you're a regular reader of the site, you've probably noticed that it has had a lot of problems in recent weeks. It holds steady for a few days, then crashes hard. After some emergency surgery--the virtual equivalent of keeping a car together with Bondo and duct tape--it comes back to life for a while. It merrily goes about its business for a week or so until it goes around a corner a little too fast and loses a fender. More duct tape.

Eventually I got wise to its ways and hired someone to try to deal with some of the worst of it. He poked around under the hood and found that I would need a long-term solution but could probably get by for a time with a temporary short-term fix. Yesterday was the day for the short-term fix. It didn't work. Actually, the site crashed out worse than it ever has in the 10 years of its existence.

Right before it blew up I noticed that today was to be day 3,335 since I made the commitment to blog every day (Just for kicks I keep a little counter running down at the very bottom-right of the site.). For a while it seemed like that potentially obsessive streak might be in jeopardy, and I don't think that would have crushed me. I was glad for that. In the end it didn’t matter. I had some superhero programmers hard at work and they resuscitated it with what I assume is even better, stronger and stickier duct tape. We've got more work to do, but I'm hoping it holds at least through the Christmas season. I may need to take action before then.

It was a long and frustrating day. This blog of mine is one of those things that does strange things to my heart. I'm not sure that I can untangle what is good and what is evil, what is noble and what is not. I find it really tough when the server goes down; it feels like a part of me is broken. I guess that's understandable. But then somewhere I’m quite sure it tips over the edge into just pure heart idolatry. I heard myself grumble this morning that I figured there was some spiritual lesson to learn in all of this, but that I'd be happier to learn that lesson at another time and in another context. As if I actually get to make those decisions. I'm pretty sure I take it too hard when the site explodes and Aileen would probably agree.

I found myself thinking back 3,335 days and realized that maybe I have been slow to adapt to the ways the site has changed over the years. 3,335 days ago I was paying $8 a month for hosting and about 8 people a day were visiting. That was a long time ago. In the past 24 hours 40,000 or 50,000 people attempted to visit and received that ugly and oh-so-unhelpful error message. I think the site may have become the guy who just can't deal with the fact that he's got a 40-inch waist and still tries to squeeze into those 32-inch Levis. It's not working but we're all kind of embarrassed to tell you that.

Something else has happened over the years. In some way challies.com made a slow transition from my site to oursite. I don't mean to overstate the case and I hope that doesn't sound arrogant, but the volume of emails and text messages and instant messages and everything else short of telegrams I received today showed to me in a fresh way that the site matters; that it plays a role in more lives than my own. Seeing a graph that displays the number of visitors in a week makes it all very abstract to me; getting emails from people saying, "I need to start my day with A La Carte!" makes it very personal.

So I need to get this fixed. I will get this fixed. That means moving on from the underpowered server I'm on and moving to something that can handle what we're throwing at it day after day. This server is probably built to serve up 100,000 pages a month; we're asking it for well over a half million. And it just isn't working anymore. I may just need to ask your patience over the next few weeks while I try to make that move.

Meanwhile, thanks for visiting. Truly, it is a humbling thing to know how many people have chosen to make challies.com a regular visit. I'm more grateful than you know.

This is the fifteenth installment in a series on theological terms. See previous posts on the terms theology, Trinity, creation, man, Fall, common grace, sin, righteousness, faith, pride, election, revelation, atonement, and adoption.

The concept of sanctification is found throughout Scripture and in reference to a variety of subjects. For example, God sanctifies the seventh day in Genesis 2, Moses and the people sanctify the priests in Exodus 28, Jesus commands us to pray that God would sanctify his name in Matthew 6, and so on. But though the subjects and circumstances can vary, the general meaning of the word remains consistent. To sanctify (the process of which we call sanctification) means to render someone or something unique, to set it apart or make it holy.

In Christian theology, the term sanctification is used most often to describe the setting apart or making holy of Christians. After being justified and adopted by God, Christians begin a process in which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, they are incrementally transformed in every aspect into the likeness of Jesus Christ.

One of the clearest passages on this is Paul’s prayer at the end of 1 Thessalonians:

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it. (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24)

Among the many wonderful things that can (and should) be said about sanctification, perhaps the most important and most encouraging is what Paul makes clear here: sanctification is an act of God, and having begun the work, he will always be faithful to bring it to completion.

Marco Ament’s The Magazine is a new iPad-only magazine that publishes four or five medium-length articles every two weeks. The articles cover a wide variety of subjects targeted largely at geeks and curious people. I think I probably qualify under both headings. It’s a unique publication and one I’ve generally enjoyed, though, as with every magazine, there are both hits and misses.

The November 7 issue featured a hit by Harry Marks, an aspiring novelist, who wrote about “The Problem with Self-Publishing.” Self-publishing has long existed in one form or another and used to be considered “vanity publishing”—a way an author could satisfy his pride by seeing his name in print even if all other avenues had been closed. However, it has traditionally been an expensive option, requiring the author to pay in advance to have a certain number of copies of his book typeset and printed. Marks says:

It used to be difficult getting a novel published. Aspiring writers would slave over their legal pads and later computers for months, even years, writing and revising and rewriting until they had something they could call “passable.” These hopeful scribes would then draft query letters, synopses, resumes, and other proposal items and submit them to agents, filing away rejection letter after rejection letter until the fateful day one brave literary agent would take a chance on them.

What is true of novels is true of every other genre. Many hopeful authors today continue to wage this long battle only to face continual rejection. However, there is now a new way out of this loop of rejection: self-publishing that costs nothing or nearly nothing. While self-publishing used to require a significant up-front payment, today it is as simple as putting together an ebook or using one of the print-on-demand publishers that will print (literally) anything and take only a royalty on copies sold. Now anyone can print anything. Many do. I know this because they send me their books.

I am not entirely opposed to self-publishing. Not everyone self-publishes for poor reasons and not every self-published book is of poor quality. Some people self-publish because they want to give their book away for free or for the absolute lowest cost. Others want to produce just a limited number of copies for a very fixed reason. Well and good. But this is the exception far more than the rule. Self-published books show up in my mailbox in waves, and while I am always eager to find the proverbial diamond in the rough, most of these books have very little to commend them. Of the hundreds or thousands of self-published books I’ve received over the years, I could count on one hand the ones that have been even close to the quality of books published through traditional channels. So many have awful covers (and yes, we do judge books by their covers), terrible layouts, unreadable fonts, hundreds of spelling mistakes, endless grammatical blunders, and on and on.

Marks’ concern is mine as well. The existing systems are in place for a reason and perform many helpful functions. One of the most helpful functions is rejection. Agents reject books and so too do acquisitions editors. Their job is to serve as gatekeepers and to refuse the books that are least worthy of publication. Though we can grant that they occasionally judge poorly and reject books that would sell well or that would make a significant contribution to a certain field, these gatekeepers are trained and equipped to filter out the worst and least helpful of the millions of submissions. When they reject a book, they almost always do the reader a favor.

Christmas is fast approaching and, as I so often do at this time of the year, I feel tension between Christmas as a day to commemorate the birth of Jesus and Christmas as a day to exchange gifts and spend time with family. I don’t think there is any good reason to feel this tension, as if these things cannot co-exist, and yet it is there year after year.

As Christmas draws near, my church is spending four Sundays looking at Songs for the Savior, the four songs Luke records in the opening chapters of his account of the life of Jesus. This past Sunday we looked to Mary’s song and saw it as an opportunity to respond to the news of Christ’s incarnation as Mary did: with trust in the good purposes of God and with rejoicing in the character of God as revealed in the miracle of God becoming man.

What stood out to me about Mary’s response to the news that she would give birth to this child is her humility through it all. You might think that being chosen to be the mother of the Messiah would generate pride, but this is not what we see in Mary. Though she immediately understood that people would forevermore regard her as specially blessed, she knew that she was in no way deserving of this honor. It was nothing that she had earned.

…he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed; for his who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

This is not the Mary of Roman Catholicism who was without sin and, in that way, the most suitable mother in all of human history. No, she is a sinful girl who stands in desperate need of the very Savior she is carrying. She is humbled at the honor that is hers because she has a realistic assessment of who she is.

He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

Do you see what she does here? She compares herself to people who have great intellectual gifts, who have great power and authority, and who have great wealth, and she realizes that she is just a young girl from a small and unimportant town in an out-of-the-way province. As one author has said, she is a nobody from a nothing town in the middle of nowhere.

Of all I love about God—and there is a lot I could list!—this is very near the top, that he chooses such unlikely people to benefit from his gifts and his grace. He lifts up those who know they are unworthy and brings down those who consider themselves most worthy. He passes over so many of the brilliant and rich and powerful, and instead bestows his grace on the lost and the least.

In some areas of my life God has called me to lead and in other areas he has called me to follow. Whether I am leading or following, the calling is one of service. As Jesus said, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” Leaders must serve in their leadership and followers must serve in their following.

God has called me to lead my family and he has called me to be involved in the leadership of my local church. And in all my leading these words from David Powlison present me with a challenge: "You particularly image Christ by looking out for the well-being of those God has placed within your care."

Powlison’s words challenge me by demanding an answer to this question: In my leadership am I providing an accurate picture of Christ? Or do the ones I lead see an image of Christ that is warped and distorted? Do they see me looking out for their well-being as Christ looked out for the well-being of those he loved? Or do they see selfishness instead?

Do my children look to the way I lead my wife and see a reflection of the love of Christ? Or do they have cause to doubt that he is truly for them, that he loves them with a steadfast and immovable love?

Do the men and women of Grace Fellowship Church see me leading them and learn that Christ labors for them in prayer, that he longs for them to know the Father through the Word? Or do they see a distortion, a picture of Christ who is self-centered and lazy and ambivalent.

This is why these words from Powlison challenge me as a leader. There are many measures I could use in an attempt to gauge the effectiveness of my leadership. I could measure by the way people receive me, by the way they regard me, by the number of people who follow me, by wealth or health or happiness. Each of these measures is too easily manipulated; each is too subjective, too prone to my own agenda.

But when I frame the success of leadership in its relationship to Christ, here is where my heart has little room to run away or hide or manipulate. Here my heart must see Christ as the model and myself as the one striving to be like him. Am I a good and godly leader? I need only look to Christ and see myself in relation to him; that is where I’ll find my answer.