John Feinberg suggests eight tests for moral decision-making in matters that are not absolutes:

The first question is, am I fully persuaded that it is right? Paul says (Rom 14:5, 14 , 23) that whatever we do in these areas, we must be persuaded it is acceptable before God. If we are not fully persuaded, we doubt rather than believe that we can do this and stand acceptably before God. If there is doubt, Paul says, there is sin (v. 23). So if there is any doubt, regardless of the reason for doubt, one should refrain. In the future, doubt might be removed, and then one could indulge; but while there is doubt, one must refrain.

Second, can I do it as unto the Lord? Whatever we do, Paul says, we must do as unto the Lord (Rom 14:6–8). To do something as unto the Lord is to do it as serving him. If one cannot serve the Lord (for whatever reason) in the doing of the activity, he should refrain.

Third, can I do it without being a stumbling block to my brother or sister in Christ? Much of Romans 14 (vv. 13, 15, 20–21) concerns watching out for the other brother’s or sister’s walk with the Lord. We may be able to indulge, but he or she may not have faith to see that the activity is morally indifferent. If he or she sees us participate, he or she may be offended. As much as possible, we must avoid giving offense in these areas. This, however, does not mean one must always refrain. Paul’s advice in 14:22 is helpful. For one who believes he can indulge, his faith is right, but let him have it before God. In other words, he need not flaunt his liberty before others. It is enough for him and the Lord to know he can partake of these practices. In sum, if one truly cares about his brother’s or sister’s walk, sometimes he will refrain, and at other times he will exercise his liberty privately.

Fourth, does it bring peace? In Rom 14:17–18  Paul says the kingdom of God is not about things such as the meat we eat or what we drink. Instead, it is about righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Thus, believers should handle these matters so as to serve Christ. How would one do that? Paul instructs us (v. 19) to do what brings peace. Certain practices may be acceptable for one person, but if others saw him indulge, it might stir up strife between them. Hence, one must do what brings peace.

Fifth, does it edify my brother? The command to do what edifies is in the same verse as the charge to do what brings peace (14:19). By juxtaposing the two demands, Paul makes an important point. Some activities may not create strife with another Christian, but they may not edify him either. One must choose activities that both bring peace and edify.

Sixth, is it profitable? In 1 Cor 6:12  Paul addresses the issue of Christian liberty, and he reminds believers that morally indifferent practices are all lawful, but they may not all be profitable. They may be unprofitable for us or for our brother. For example, no law prohibits moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages or social dancing, but if my indulgence in either of these activities causes a brother to stumble, it is unprofitable for me to indulge. If the act is unprofitable, I must refuse to do it.

Seventh, does it enslave me? (1 Cor 6:12 ). Many activities, wholesome and valuable in themselves, become unprofitable if they master us more than Christ does. As John warns, Christians must not love the world, but are to love God instead (1 John 2:15ff ). It is not that everything in the world is evil and worthless. Rather, our devotion and affections must be focused first and foremost on God. If we are to be enslaved to anything or anyone, it must be Christ.

A final test is, does it bring glory to God? Paul discusses Christian liberty in 1 Corinthians 10, and in verse 31 he sums up his discussion by saying that whatever we do in these areas should bring glory to God. How does one know if his actions bring God glory? We would say at the least that if one answers any of the other seven questions negatively in regard to a particular activity, he can be sure he will not bring God glory if he indulges. Conversely, if the activity is acceptable on those other grounds, it should be acceptable on this ground as well.

In sum, Scripture distinguishes between actions covered by moral absolutes and those that are not. Believers must make up their own minds (under the Holy Spirit’s leading) on what to do in matters of Christian liberty. Personal preferences must not be imposed on others. In deciding what to do, one should use these eight tests taught by Paul. Each one must answer those questions honestly before God. Whatever decision stems from that process of questioning, each must have the integrity to obey.

Thousands of Messianic Jews reside in Israel, perform Jewish ceremonies and serve in IDF
Yoaz Hendel

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A big “take away” from the Protestant Reformation is that salvation is by faith alone and that we do not need a mediator other than Christ. As the apostle Paul declared in Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you are saved through (or by) faith, it is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast.”

Yet believers in Christian sub-cultures have such strong expectations of what all believers need to know and do that we often inadvertently add to biblical standards. While we may not recognize it, we sometimes act - or are perceived - as if we expect all believers to be like us in things spiritual, theological or behavioral.

It is a serious challenge to me that Jesus did not have any patience for those who knew a great deal about God and religion but who missed the main point (Him) and who did not live out what they taught. In Matthew 23 Jesus spoke difficult truths about one group of spiritual leaders. They knew their Bible, and they worked hard at “evangelism,” crossing “land and sea” to seek converts.

But Jesus says, “You keep locking people out of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 23:13b, NET Bible). The NET Bible lists a literal rendering as, “because you are closing the kingdom of heaven before people.” What a challenge to those today who call ourselves followers of Christ! What are we doing that might be locking people out of God’s kingdom? Read the rest HERE.

GREG H. PARSONS, GLOBAL DIRECTOR, U.S. CENTER FOR WORLD MISSION

They have a church resource set, which contains posters, sermon outlines, a DVD, leader’s guide, and small-group participants’ guides. This is a great way to introduce a “culture of peacemaking” throughout the church. A newer resource is a DVD-based group study designed specifically church leadership teams, called The Leadership Opportunity: Living Out the Gospel Where Conflict and Leadership Intersect.

Here are some free online resources that give you an idea about their approach:

• Getting to the Heart of Conflict – Conflict starts in the heart. Therefore, if we fail to address the heart in a conflict, then any solution will fall short of true reconciliation.
• The Four G’s – The biblical system for resolving conflict is captured by “The Four G’s”: Glorify God, Get the log out of your own eye, Gently Restore, and Go and be reconciled.
• The Slippery Slope – A visual tool for understanding the ways people tend to and ought to respond to conflict.
• The Seven A’s of Confession – A guide to making a sincere and complete confession.
• The PAUSE Principle – A biblical approach to negotiation.
• The Four Promises of Forgiveness – A great way to remember what you are really saying (and committing to) when you say “I forgive you.”
• The Peacemaker’s Pledge – Complete summary of biblical peacemaking, suitable for churches or organizations to commit to together.
• Relational Commitments – A way for a church to make a mutual commitment to work together to pursue unity, maintain friendships, preserve marriages, and build relationships that reflect the love of Christ.
• The Gospel of Peace Mirrored Through Peacemaking – A summary statement of how the gospel of Jesus Christ is at the core of biblical peacemaking.

Let me give you a quick outline of one of these resources (go here for the full version). They talk about The Slippery Slope, a very helpful visual for thinking about the different ways we can and should respond to conflict:

Escape Responses
On the left side are three responses typically used by those who want to avoid or get away from conflict instead of resolving it. Starting with the most extreme, they are:

1. Suicide
2. Flight
3. Denial

Attack Responses

On the other side of the slippery slope spectrum are attack responses, going to the most extreme:

1. Assault
2. Litigation
3. Murder

Peacemaking Responses

In the middle are responses of conciliation, recognizing that the gospel is the key to peace.

The six responses are divided into two categories:

Personal peacemaking:

1. Overlook an offense
2. Reconciliation
3. Negotiation

Assisted responses

1. Mediation
2. Arbitration
3. Accountability

Again, I find these sorts of tools very helpful for providing a grid of responses to conflict.

If you’re looking for helpful books applying peacemaking to various roles and aspects of life, here is what WTS Books carries:

• Ken Sande, Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict, 3rd ed.
• Alfred Poirier, The Peacemaking Pastor: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Church Conflict
• Tara Klena Barthel and Judy Dabler, Peacemaking for Women: Biblical Hope for Resolving Conflict
• Ken Sande with Tom Raabe, Peacemaking for Families: A Biblical Guide to Managing Conflict in Your Home
• Ken Sande and Kevin Johnson, The Peacemaker Student Edition: Handling Conflict without Fighting Back or Running Away
• Corlette Sander, The Young Peacemaker: Teaching Students to Respond to Conflict in God’s Way

Pastor Joe Thorn has a good series here briefly refuting five common myths about hell:

1.      Hell is a place where Satan reigns.

2.      Hell is where sinners party.

3.      Hell is temporary.

4.      Hell is the absence of God.

5.      Hell is for bad people.

I hope that tons of folks read Fred Sanders’s new book, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything. It is an incredibly important book.

Here’s one quote:

Because the gospel is Trinitarian, evangelicals as gospel people are by definition Trinity people, whether or not they think so. It only makes sense that if the gospel is inherently Trinitarian, the most consistently and self-consciously Trinitarian movement of Christians would be the movement that has named itself after the gospel, the evangel: evangelicalism.

And another:

If the two [evangelical] problems of weak Trinitarianism and shallowness are related, there is also a single solution: we must dig deeper into the gospel itself.

Matthew Anderson is downright giddy about the book. He writes on his blog:

But The Deep Things of God isn’t just personally edifying, though it is that.  It is not only offers a robust solution to evangelical shallowness.

It is a performance of an evangelicalism I can make my home in, an evangelicalism that emphasizes Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven within a robustly Trinitarian framework that doesn’t reject our evangelical heritage, but reads it lovingly and critically to retrieve the riches that have been forgotten and neglected.

The Deep Things of God is a must read for evangelicals who are disenchanted with the movement, and for those who think there is nothing to learn from it.

Concert in The Great Synagogue Budapest Hungary

Here’s a recent interview she did on helping the church to became a safe place for people to grieve.

An excerpt:

Grieving people have four primary needs that the church has a key role in addressing:

1.      They have intense sadness that is lonely and lingering that needs to be respected.

2.      They have significant questions that need to be addressed in light of Scripture.

3.      They have broken relationships that need to be healed and normalized.

4.      They have a deep desire to discover some meaning and purpose in their loss.

While we make room for people to be sad, we want to walk with people in expectation that God will indeed do a work of healing in their lives so that they do not stay stuck in their sadness, but emerge from it strengthened in their confidence in God, deepened in their understanding of the Scriptures, and equipped to serve others.

You can read the whole thing here.

From a different angle, but touching on the same issue, I was reminded of Carl Trueman’s provocative essay, “What Can Miserable Christians Sing?” in The Wages of Spin (pp. 159-160).

Now, one would not expect the world to have much time for the weakness of the psalmists’ cries. It is very disturbing, however, when these cries of lamentation disappear from the language and worship of the church. Perhaps the Western church feels no need to lament—but then it is sadly deluded about how healthy it really is in terms of numbers, influence and spiritual maturity. Perhaps—and this is more likely—it has drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries and regards them as little short of embarassing. Yet the human condition is a poor one—and Christians who are aware of the deceitfulness of the human heart and are looking for a better country should know this. A diet of unremittingly jolly choruses and hymns inevitably creates an unrealistic horizon of expectation which sees the normative Christian life as one long triumphalist street party—a theologically incorrect and a pastorally disastrous scenario in a world of broken individuals. Has an unconscious belief that Christianity is—or at least should be—all about health, wealth, and happiness corrupted the content of our worship?

. . . In the psalms, God has given the church a language which allows it to express even the deepest agonies of the human soul in the context of worship. Does our contemporary language of worship reflect the horizon of the expectation regarding the believer’s experience which the psalter proposes as normative? If not, why not? Is it because the comfortable values of Western middle-class consumerism have silently infiltrated the church and made us consider such cries irrelevant, embarrassing, and signs of abject failure?

In a new 9Marks interview Mark Dever interviews Carolyn McCulley, the 29-year-old author of Radical Womanhood: Feminine Faith in a Feminist World (Moody 2008). Carolyn is also a conference speaker, blogger, and the founder of a social issues documentary company, Citygate Films.

The interview covers Carolyn’s personal background, her early disdain for the church, her conversion, her love of the gospel and the church, her background in journalism, her thoughts on racial reconciliation and social justice, and her work at Sovereign Grace Ministries.

They also discuss book writing, relationships, singleness, how pastors can help serve single women in their churches, gender roles and distinctions in the church, feminism, human trafficking, persecution in Pakistan, gender roles in the home, family productivity, recommended authors, blogging, and her book projects (in that order).

Listen or download the 66-minute interview here.