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Spring 2008 The Centrality Of The Gospel |
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From The Editor |
There
was a knock on the door of my study early last December. Upon my invitation,
a familiar face peeked inside. It was the wife of one of my seminary colleagues.
After extending her typically warm greeting she said: “Christmas is
just around the corner, and I’d like to get my husband something he
would really enjoy reading. Any suggestions?” Knowing that my brilliant
brother’s proclivity for nightstand reading includes such tomes as
Justification And Variegated Nomism and The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,
I immediately suggested a biography (with pictures, no less!). I told his
wife of a book that, some fifteen years ago, proved to be a means of great
influence in my life: the two-volume edition of George Whitefield
by Arnold Dallimore . . . |
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Feature |
Many
have commented on the fact that the church in the western world is going
through a time of remarkable fragmentation. This fragmentation extends to
our understanding of the gospel. For some Christians, "the gospel"
is a narrow set of teachings about Jesus and his death and resurrection
which, rightly believed, tip people into the kingdom. After that, real discipleship
and personal transformation begin, but none of that is integrally related
to “the gospel.” This is a far cry from the dominant New Testament
emphasis that understands “the gospel” to be the embracing category
that holds much of the Bible together, and takes Christians from lostness
and alienation from God all the way through conversion and discipleship
to the consummation, to resurrection bodies, and to the new heaven and the
new earth . . |
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Interview |
Dr.
Robert Smith, Jr. serves as Professor of Christian Preaching at Beeson Divinity
School. An ordained Baptist minister, he served as pastor of the New Mission
Missionary Baptist Church for twenty years and has preached and taught in
over forty schools in the United States, Great Britain, and the Caribbean.
Having authored and contributed to numerous works, his most recent publication
is Doctrine That Dances: Bringing Doctrinal Preaching and Teaching to
Life (B&H Publishing Group), which was selected as the winner of
the 2008 Preaching Book of the Year Award by Preaching Magazine . .
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Excerpts From A Sermon |
I am here to talk to you about what ministry shaped by the gospel, profoundly shaped by the gospel, really looks like . . . In this letter, Peter was not writing to the same type of situation Paul addressed in his letter to the Corinthians. Paul was writing into a situation where there were doctrinal fractions, divisions, and party divisiveness . . . Peter was speaking to a persecuted church – a church which was both passively and actively persecuted . . . they were being beset by a culture around them with very different values that they do not know how to relate to. So, of course, you can never divide the doctrinal from the practical issues. However, I would say that Peter here was less concerned about expounding on the content of the gospel as Paul was in 1 Corinthians 15. I’ll show how the gospel should shape the way in which we live, our ministry, and how the church operates as a community . . . |
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