Rescue: Born Again
[Nicodemus] came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
John 3:2–3 (NRSV)
It was a common occurrence in church circles to hear an exchange like this:
“Do you know Jesus?”
“I go to church; I’m a Christian.”
“But, are you born again?”
In the 60’s there was not only the Sexual Revolution but a resurgence of interest in Jesus. One favorite song from that time stated, “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord.”
Many people grew tired of the formal dead religion in many mainline churches of the 50’s and 60’s and were looking for more. They saw many Christian who were Christians in name only (nominal Christians), with little evidence of godly character. They wanted more from their relationship with Jesus.
If fact, that is what they sought, a relationship with Jesus, a real conversion, not just mental agreement with a few doctrines. They began to experience authentic conversion and invite others to do the same they became Jesus People.
Some in the movement wanted to be distinguished from the nominal Christians they knew and so latched on the term “born again.”
There have been other movements that sought to do the same thing. People identified themselves as Spirit-filled, Full-Gospel, and nowadays, Followers of Jesus. The one thing these monikers have in common is a desire to have a genuine experience of conversion – being born again.
The passage above translates the term accurately, "born from above." You can readily see Nicodemus’ confusion. He took the phrase quite literally and wondered how it was even possible.
Jesus was speaking in spiritual terms, as he often did. What does it mean to be born from above? Being born from above means that we have had an authentic experience of conversion with a sincere desire for our values, motivations, and ethics to be shaped from the perspective of the kingdom of God.
In this way, God rescues us from the self-centeredness of our lives and frees us for life as God meant it to be.
Join me Sunday are we talk more about this part of God’s Rescue plan for us.
Blessings!
- Alan
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Alan Cassady serves as Senior Pastor at Navarre UMC, and has been at the church since 2011. When he's not preaching and teaching, he enjoys sci-fi movies and FSU Football. Read more about Alan here.
Rescue: Reconciled
But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Romans 5:8–11 (NRSV)
Estranged. That word just sounds bad, doesn’t it? Webster’s Dictionary defines the word this way: to remove from customary environment or associations; to arouse especially mutual enmity or indifference in where there had formerly been love, affection, or friendliness. Webster’s goes on to mention synonyms like alienate and disaffect.
One of the main messages of Scripture is that something has broken our relationship with God and God has been working throughout history to rescue us and restore the relationship. In most church circles, this idea is summed up in the words “saved” or “salvation.” But those words have a flat meaning – we are saved from hell and get to go the heaven.
What God accomplished in the rescue is infinitely more beautiful and comprehensive that that! For the weeks leading up to Easter, we are going to look at several of the ways the New Testament envisions God’s rescue plan for us.
We will look at images like Reconciliation, New Birth, Redemption, Citizenship, and Forgiveness. It is my hope that looking at these portrayals of God’s rescue work will help us grow in our appreciation for God’s work and the relationship God offers us.
This week we will look at the image of reconciliation. Reconciliation implies that there was a relationship that had been strained or broken; the emphasis is on the relationship. It is not just that we have broken some rules or laws and need to be forgiven, but that we have broken a relationship of trust with our heavenly Father. God has taken the first step to repairing that relationship and offering reconciliation to us. But, just like reconciling with a friend or a misbehaving spouse, reconciliation is on God’s terms and not ours. We just can’t tell God, “Yeah, I messed up, I’m sorry, so you need to just get over it.” God expects a good faith response called repentance and a willingness to submit to the relationship.
God has already done everything that can be done from his standpoint to provide for reconciliation (if he had not, reconciliation would not even be possible). Now, it is up to us to respond to that offer and come back to God.
I hope you will join us for this entire series as we explore the many-sided picture of God’s rescue.
Blessings!
- Alan
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Alan Cassady serves as Senior Pastor at Navarre UMC, and has been at the church since 2011. When he's not preaching and teaching, he enjoys sci-fi movies and FSU Football. Read more about Alan here.
Worship/Philosophy 101: What we sing matters.
Editor's Note: this blog is part one of a series of blogs about our philosophy of worship. Stay tuned over the next few months for the rest of the series
"Let the message about Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom he gives. Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts. And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father." - Colossians 3:16-17
NERDSSSS
If you've talked to me for more than ten minutes then it should be apparent that I am a giant nerd. Like, the world's most giant nerd. My friend Robbie would disagree with me, but then again he runs a podcast that's literally called "The Nerd Cave." But we'll agree to disagree. (But seriously, if you never have before, skip to the end of this blog and read my bio #nationallyrankednerd).
If you're still reading at this point you either A.) like me a lot, or 2.) are wondering where on God's green earth I'm going with this. (So am I) Anyways, I'm a nerd about a lot of things, but one of my favorite things to nerd out over is music. And like any giant nerd who loves music, I thrived in my time as a music major in college. I was the top of my class in theory and composition and I loved learning more about the great composers that came before me. Now, if you know anything about music, you probably know that nobody can agree on who the second greatest composer of all time is. (In my opinion that's Gustav Mahler, but you probably disagree with me) There isn't much dissent, however, when it comes to the greatest of all time - the GOAT. The Tom Brady of Composers. The Mickey Mantle of Making Music. (#alliteration). That composer is, of course, the indomitable Johann Sebastian Bach.
GET OFF MY BACH, MAN
Besides being the most prolific and respected composer of the Baroque period, J.S. Bach should also be remembered as a killer worship leader. Bach didn't just write great music - he wrote great Church Music. A devoted Lutheran, Bach was fortunate to grow up after the Protestant Revolution (we celebrate it's 500th anniversary this year) and to have the chance to work in a new world that appreciated and celebrated the role of music in worship (For many years prior the Catholic Church had moved away from music in worship with the exception of chant). After having many steady composition and organ jobs throughout his career, Bach settled in Leipzig for the last 27 years of his life - he was appointed Cantor of the Thomasschule at St. Thomas Church, where he provided music for the four largest churches in his city. Its a poor comparison for a lot of reasons, but Bach was basically the Chris Tomlin of his day. He wrote worship music, he was freakishly well-known, and he did it for a lot of people. Bach approached his music with an intentionality that I greatly respect - it wasn't just music for music's sake. After having studied Bach's life and music extensively, I came to a conclusion about worship music.
Worship music can't just be a pretty melody filled with empty platitudes and overdone cliches. What we sing matters.
What we sing matters.
On the surface that's not a revolutionary statement. But you'd be surprised how many song requests I get that try to prove that statement wrong.
POSITIVE. ENCOURAGING.
I talk a lot about K-Love (the #1 Christian radio station in the country) and honestly that talk is very rarely in a positive light. I could write an entire series of blogs about my issues with K-Love, but the issue I have here is less about them and more about the music that the Christian Music industry supplies them with. A lot of what we hear on the radio is a pretty watered-down representation of our beliefs - Many of the songs the industry supplies us with are shallow, vapid, manipulative toe-tappers that rely on using music to elicit an emotional response from you, the consumer, instead of propping up your faith with scripture and truth. (There's a formula: Vague Struggles + References to Water = CCLI Top 25. Watch this unfortunately accurate parody video.) Some of those songs are even borderline heretical (and I don't throw that word around like it's nothing).
I spend a lot of time listening to worship music. A lot. And from my perspective, modern worship music has two large problems to reckon with.
- The Christian Music industry, which produces all of what you hear on K-Love and most of the songs that make it to the CCLI top 100 (the measurement we use to find out which songs are being sung by the most churches), doesn't have the same commitment to biblical literacy and understanding that the church does. They have a commitment to the bottom line.
- People have been told, either directly or indirectly, that positivity is to be valued above all else. Even at the expense of truth.
- (Here's a bonus:) Our United Methodist Hymnal contains about 500 songs spanning nearly 500 years of church music. For hundreds of years getting new hymn books was the only way of getting new music. In comparison, there were almost certainly at least 500 songs written and released last year - all readily available to the public and marketed as the next big thing. Quality control is a real issue.
That first point is a huge issue, and the other two points are a direct result of it. If what we sing matters, why are we constantly supplied with poor songs to sing? I think that it would be unfair to characterize the songs that are being written now as objectively worse than what came before - "the great old hymns." Unfortunately, that characterization is alive and well in many churches and in the minds of many people. The hymnal, in most cases, represent the songs that stood the test of time because they were singable and contained truth. There were many more songs that haven't made it into our modern hymnals because they were poor songs. It's important to remember that the hymnal isn't infallible. There are new editions, and revisions, and songs that were once thought essential parts of our hymnody get lost to time because of shifts in theological thinking or musical style or even rhythmic emphasis. And some that stick around deserve to go. (Victory in Jesus comes to mind - but that's another blog). Today, there are many songwriters not attached to the "industry" that are writing brilliant songs that just don't get heard, and there are many songwriters in the industry whose best work doesn't pass the sniff test.
PRACTICE MAKES PERMANENT
All of these things are a problem for us, because again: What we sing matters. It informs what we believe. It gives us a lens, good or bad, through which to interpret scripture. It binds us together in a common train of thought and a common understanding of basic doctrine like the trinity, the resurrection, or atonement. And if we sing something that either intentionally or unintentionally misrepresents basic doctrine then we learn bad theology. My piano professor hated the phrase "practice makes perfect." She thought it was misleading, and she was right. To say it more accurately, "practice makes permanent." The first time she told me that I was floored. I thought I could just put in the time and I'd be great, but I found out that it actually matters how I went about things. I had learned bad habits through lazy practice that almost ruined my career. Imagine how much worse it is for us when we learn bad theology through lazy songwriting?
Because of this, everything we sing on Sunday morning goes through the same filter: a rubric. (I'm still a certified K-12 educator in the state of Florida. We love rubrics.) I use the rubric to answer some basic questions about a song:
- What kind of song is it, and how well does it achieve it's goal?
- How well does it deal with the trinity?
- Is it written for corporate worship (we vs I)
- how well do the lyrics "work?"
- How singable is the melody?
That's a sampling of the (admittedly ridiculous) process that songs go through before they get sung on Sunday morning. I'll admit that not every song we sing right now passes my test. But every new song we introduce does, and we're doing our best to get away from singing songs that don't. Every time someone gives me a song suggestion I put it on the list (I'm backlogged - fair warning) and work down the list vetting songs and filing them in either the "accepted" or "rejected" drawer. Both drawers are pretty full right now, to be honest.
I take the time to put things through that process because like I said before, what we sing matters. As bad as it is for us to learn bad theology through lazy songwriting, I think that part of my responsibility as your worship leader is to make sure that those things don't happen. I take it very seriously, because I love what I do. Also, I'm a nerd.
Be blessed.
-Matt
Matt Dailey serves as Worship Director at Navarre UMC, and has been at the church since 2013. When he's not leading worship and designing graphics, he enjoys baseball, comic books and team trivia (his team is nationally ranked. #micdrop). Read more about Matt here.
The Book: Resources
In last week’s sermon, I mentioned that I would share some beneficial resources for you as you begin you journey in understanding the Bible. Here are some very useful resources, including some favorite commentaries on the Book of Revelation.
Online and Electronic Resources
Bible.faithlife.com
This is an online Study Bible produced by FaithLife (formerly Logos Software). It can be used online or there are links to iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. [Free]
Logos Basic
This is a computer program for both Windows and Mac. [Free]
General Bible Study – Method
Ausley, Matt Friedeman; Lisa Friedeman. LifeChanging Bible Study - Practical Keys to a Deeper Understanding of the Word. Wilmore, Ky.: Francis Asbury Press, 2009.
Thompson, David L. Bible Study That Works. Revised ed. Nappanee, IN: Evangel Publishing House, 1994.
General works on Bible Interpretation
Guthrie, George, and David S. Dockery. Holman Guide to Interpreting the Bible: Your Journey Begins Here. Nashville, TN: B & H Publishing Group, 2004.
Myers, Allen C. The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987.
Bible Dictionary
Achtemeier, Paul J, Publishers Harper & Row, and Society of Biblical Literature. Harper’s Bible Dictionary. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985.
Myers, Allen C. The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987.
Powell, Mark Allan, ed. The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary (Revised and Updated). New York: HarperCollins, 2011.
Concordance
III, John R. Kohlenberger. NIV Bible Concordance. Reissue edition. Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 2012.
———. The NIV Exhaustive Bible Concordance, Third Edition: A Better Strong’s Bible Concordance. 3rd Special ed. edition. Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 2015.
Strong, James. The New Strong’s Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Expanded edition. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010.
Dictionaries to Help with Biblical Words
Mounce, William D. Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words. Supersaver ed. edition. Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 2006.
Commentaries and Bible Background
Clendenen, E. Ray, and Jeremy Royal Howard, eds. The Holman Illustrated Bible Commentary. Ill edition. Nashville, Tennessee: Holman Reference, 2015.
Keener, Craig S. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. 02 edition. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2014.
Cross Reference
Nelson, Thomas. The New Treasury of Scripture Knowledge: An Easy-to-Use One-Volume Library for Bible Study and Lesson Preparation. Edited by Jerome H. Smith. Rev Exp Su edition. Nashville, Tenn: Thomas Nelson, 1992.
Commentaries on Revelation
Keener, Craig S. Revelation. The NIV Application Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1999.
Mulholland, Robert, and Grant Osborne. James, 1-2 Peter, Jude, Revelation. Edited by Philip W. Comfort. Carol Stream, Ill: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2011.
III, Ben Witherington. Revelation. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Calvin and Hoops
Calvin and Hoops
One of the fun things about working with teenagers is that you can be playing basketball with them while simultaneously having a discussion about predestination vs free will. This actually happened to me last night. It was part of a larger conversation about the differences in Calvinist and Wesleyan theology that spanned a basketball game AND bled over into football. At one point in the conversation, this student asked “Well isn’t there evidence in the Bible for both?”. Yes. Yes there is.
The fact that this student stumbled upon is the bane of every theologians' existence: the Bible can be used to support a lot of different theologies. This is part of the reason why our current series "The Book" is so important, because it gets into some of the myths about the Bible. People from every Christian denomination are reading the same Bible (well, different translations of the same ancient texts) yet they still believe vastly different things. The other thing this student said that was way ahead of his age was “Well, doesn’t that mean that their theology isn’t wrong, just different?”
Uh...
And that’s where youth ministry breaks, or at least my ability to multitask sports and theology breaks. The short answer is yes, or no, or I don’t know. The long answer is getting a Sacred Theology Doctorate and coming to the same answers but for different reasons. With empirical reasoning it can be easy to say that if person A and person B believe differently about the same thing they can’t both be right. Either person A is right or person B is or they could both be wrong. The fun part is we can’t say for sure on a lot of things which person is actually right. But then you throw in God logic where Jesus is fully God and fully man yet part of a three in one trinity and you can get to the point where maybe they are both right.
Now that I’ve probably muddied up the waters too much, what are we supposed to do about this? Well the first and most important step is you should read your Bible, but that can’t be your only step.
There’s this thing called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral that is designed exactly for these kinds of situations. John Wesley, the leader of the Methodist movement, is the one who put this process together. He posited that theology and interpretation should be based on scripture, reason, experience, and tradition. This explains how people can look at the same book and get two different conclusions, because while the scripture doesn’t change our traditions, experiences, and reasoning can be different. It’s a process of hermeneutics and exegesis (Big Scary Words for trying to figure out what scripture actually meant for the original audience and how that applies to us today). This process is so important that there are entire classes on these things and it’s woven into any sermon or small group lesson that’s worth while. And while those words and the process can seem daunting, it’s something that anyone who wants to take the next step in their understanding of scripture should take.
What about me?
There are several good books out there that help people figure out the basics. The standard book is How To Read The Bible For All It’s Worth. There are others out there that might fit your level better. If you’ve never done any Bible study before, maybe start with The Bible for Dummies (sorry for the name, you are not dumb). Or if you really want a challenge, try working your way through New Testament Exegesis. These books, especially that last one, might bring up all sorts of questions. You might have to have the book open in one hand and the other hand typing things into google, but you can always talk to one of us on staff about it. Find other people who are interested in these things as well, get in a small group (or better yet talk to Faith about leading a small group because the best way to learn is to teach, right?)
Be blessed.
-Nathan
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here.