PLATT: HOW RADICAL LIVING AND THE NORMAL CHRISTIAN LIFE GO TOGETHER

Platt is always thoughtful and always inspiring.  There are lots of conversations going around about being radical and the normal Christian life.  Here David clarifies the term Radical. 

5 Critical Lessons in Multiplying Leaders or Churches

This post from Exponential

is on multiplying leaders but is great advice on developing and working with leaders . . .

Over the last 18 years, Jeff Leake has led Allison Park Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on a journey of church multiplication. Leake founded and is president of Reach Northeast, a church planting network designed to facilitate new churches throughout the northeast United States. Below, he shares some of the lessons he and the church have learned through both mistakes and watching others succeed.
Lesson #1 – When sending a staff member to plant a new church, hire their replacement before sending them out.
I learned this lesson the hard way. With the first church we planted, I sent one of our pastoral staff members to be the planter. What I didn’t account for was just how much this would impact my life. What I ended up with was three extra jobs.
After doing this several times, I realized my error and more importantly how to correct it. If you know you’re sending a staff member out to plant a new church, you can delay the plant for a few months while you seek to find someone to take his or her place on your team. You also gain valuable time that can be spent having planters train their replacement.
Lesson #2 – It’s always best to define expectations upfront. You avoid so much pain later.
Relationships are hard work. Even in the best situations, misunderstandings can arise, feelings can be hurt, and partnerships damaged. Parent churches often feel they have been more than generous with the churches they’re planting. Church plants often feel that the parent church could have done more.
To avoid all these hard feelings, we now start the journey by putting together a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that communicates expectations and outlines exactly what the church planter and parent church are expected to do. Both parties sign this document at the beginning of the partnership, which helps to avoid future misunderstandings.
Realize, however, that an MOU does not replace the need for other types of relational effort. Both parent church and the plant needs to extend prayer, encouragement, friendship, and grace to the other. But putting your expectations in writing does help eliminate unnecessary grief.
Lesson #3 – Everyone needs a dad (spiritual father).
I guess this is what I enjoy most about being a parent church pastor. I get an opportunity to form a very unique and powerful relationship with the church-planting pastor. My goal is to be more than a coach and a donor. I want to provide a spiritual covering for planters and their families. I see this as so much more than just investing in a new church; I see this as investing in the life of a spiritual son.
Approaching the relationship this way sets the tone for every conversation. The planter is not just an employee or a missionary that we’re supporting. I’m choosing to encourage, develop, and shape them. When we talk, we discuss strategy. But just as often, I’m trying to speak life into their soul.
I want them to feel my prayers and know that in every way I have their back.
This relationship tone also allows for the network to develop organically. Because there is a relational investment, I’m able to provide a natural covering for the church planter even after the church has been planted. We also seek to extend that relational covering not just to the church planter and their family, but also to the new church. I want the pastoral staff and leadership team of the new church to know they have a pastor who is supporting them and is there for them if crisis occurs.
Lesson #4 –Reproducing leaders don’t show up ready-made. They must be developed.
I absolutely love Bill Hybels’ teaching on the 5 C’s that Willow Creek Community Church uses when hiring new staff:

1. Character: They must have integrity and be trustworthy;
2. Chemistry: They need to fit with the rest of the team;
3. Competency: They need to be capable in their area of assignment;
4. Calling: They need a sense that God has assigned them to us;
5. Culture: They need to carry the same DNA as the rest of the organization.

When I read this list, I completely agree that this is the criteria for a long-term and effectively functioning leader on any team. The problem comes when we search for a person who meets all five C’s, and we come up empty. What do you do when you can’t find a 5-C leader to hire or plant a new church?
You have to build 5-C leaders from scratch! In fact, the church at large needs an entire approach to leadership development that focuses on building future leaders from the ground up. Over the last few years, I have watched one of my spiritual sons build what is much like a leadership “farm system” to borrow a term from Major League Baseball.
Brian Bolt, one of the planters in our network, leads the CityReach Network and is planting churches faster than any human I have ever seen plant. Just this past September, CityReach Network planted 13 new churches on one weekend. Many of these church planters, who are planting in inner-city areas, were addicted to drugs five or six years ago. Now they’re planting churches!
Brian takes former drug addicts and turns them into church planters. How? First, he believes in them. From the moment they enter a CityReach Church, these leaders are speaking life and faith over people. They preach that God not only saves and sets free, but also that He gives us purpose and that no matter where we’ve been in life, God can use us for His purposes. Then through a system of opportunities (leading worship, preaching and testing out their skills), they provide development and a chance to get some honest and direct feedback. Brian describes these tiered opportunities much like the farm leagues in baseball (A, AA, AAA, and the Majors):

• A – Small group devotionals or worship times
• AA – Friday night outreach services
• AAA – Being on the platform to pray or lead a part of a church service
• Majors – Preaching or leading worship during a weekend service

Everytime someone steps out to lead, he or she gets a dose of “grace and truth.” Their supervisor will affirm them like crazy. Then they will identify one area where the planter needs to improve and they’ll provide honest and direct feedback to help planters grow in their skills.
Learning #5 – If we love “the one,” God will trust us with more.
One of the trends in today’s church planting world is to identify a target audience that feels cool and culturally connected. So many church planters are targeting the young adult, artistic, trend-setting, highly educated, progressive individual. And there is a huge and obvious need among that demographic because so many who fit that description are unchurched or de-churched.
But sometimes I feel that we may be overlooking some other very needed people groups. In our context, we use the term “the one” to describe someone who is hurting, forgotten, overlooked and disconnected from God. We draw this concept from Luke 14:
While Jesus was attending a banquet hosted by a wealthy friend, He said to His host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed” (Luke 14:13).
I think we could take Jesus’ words here and apply them to church planting: “When you plant a church, don’t just invite the trendy, appealing, qualified, educated, artistic, or good looking. Invite the poor, the addict, the sick, the immigrant, the old, and the mentally challenged. If you do this, you’ll be blessed.”
My experience has been that when we spend our energies going after ‘the one,” no one else is searching for—but that Jesus deeply loves—God will give us more people than we know what to do with. In fact, if you lack traction and can’t seem to get people to join your church or connect with your launch team, expand your vision and commit to going after the one.
To read all 10 of Jeff Leake’s multiplication learnings, download his new FREE eBook, The Question That Changed My Life: How Planting Life-Giving Churches Became Our Direction.

Eat The Law and Live

In keeping with our theme this year, "The Word

is your Life" we have a reflection on Psalm 19 from DesiringGod . . . .

Psalm 19 has been on the Top 40 charts for a couple thousand years. Understandably. It’s a classic. It’s short, but loaded with theological goodies (vv. 1-2, 13), great imagery (vv. 4-6), and zippy one-liners (vv. 9b-10, 14). But if you’re like me, you breeze past these rich passages in a bleary morning state during devotionals. So we often need an exercise in sitting with the depth of a passage to be nourished, instead of rushing along. Psalm 19 is the perfect place to start.

Psalm 19 has three sections.

Psalm 19:1-6: The psalmist lyricizes creation with fabulous imagery, depicting the cycle of each day as a “strong man” running his course (v. 5).
Psalm 19:7-10: The topic switches to God’s law (tôrāh), which along with God’s judicial features is perfect, sure, right, pure, and so on.
Psalm 19:11-14: The psalmist moves toward application, exhorting the reader to keep the law, asking that God remove temptation, and praying for mercy.
Biblical themes are strewn through it all. Which almost makes it easy to totally miss the most surprising and important message of Psalm 19: the law gives life.

Timeout: What?

Okay, it’s only a small part of the psalm, but that is what I am going to zoom in on. The kicker comes in verse 7, all too easy to overlook in our familiarity. It says: “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul" (ESV).

Hang on. Paul says the law that was intended to bring life actually brings death (Rom. 7:10). And we know, as card-carrying Protestants, that Paul is usually right (and the Old Testament is usually confusing). Right? Even more jarring to theologically Reformed ears, the King James Version says that the law “converts” the soul. What’s going on here? The law most certainly does not revive—give life to—the soul. Only the gospel does that. Right?

Don’t throw out your copy of Calvin’s Institutes just yet (or ever, for that matter). The phrase can be translated in other ways. The word translated as "reviving" (měšîbat) basically means “to cause to return.” So the NASB says that the law “restores” the soul, and the NIV says it “refreshes” the soul. Obviously we’re dealing with something that doesn’t neatly fit into a single English word.

The question, then, is: cause to return to where, and from where? From spiritual death to life? From disobedience to obedience? Or something else? The Hebrew word for soul here (nepeš) can also mean different things, depending on context: life, person, soul, inner being. But in terse poetry, context is just what we lack.

Gaining Our (Hebrew) Bearings

Thankfully, God has given his Word profound unity that always qualifies its diversity. So we ought to let clear Scripture explain less clear Scripture. Where else do we find these two words, “to cause to return” and “soul/life/person” together? That will help.

The particular phrase only occurs in about a dozen places by my count. “Cause the soul/life to return” is what Naomi says Ruth’s son will do now that she has “life” through offspring (Ruth 4:13). It is what Elijah prays that God would do for a dead child (1 Kg. 17:21, 22). It is what Elihu tells Job that God does for men to spare them from the pit (Job 33:30), and what David says his divine Shepherd does for him beside still waters (Ps. 23:3). So both spiritual and physical life is often in mind, whether metaphorically or not. In Psalm 23, David is of course speaking of his spiritual well-being, although he does so using the image of himself as a weary sheep in need of life-restoring drink.

But the phrase occurs most frequently in Lamentations 1, where the deserted city of Jerusalem figuratively reflects on the Babylonian siege. It was horrifying. In a siege, the food slowly depletes and the people starve until they die or surrender (1:11; 4:4; 5:6, 9). In verses 11 and 19, the inhabitants groan from hunger, asking God for food to restore their lives (lěhāšîb nāpeš) and revive their strength, using the same wording as Ps. 19:7. The narrator also asks God for mercy to restore his soul (v. 16, mašîb napšî). Lamentations makes it clear that these dire circumstances are a consequence of the people’s sin (cf. 1:8, 14, 18, 22, etc.). The pending physical death of God’s people is a result of their spiritual death, a condition accented by expulsion from the promised land.

Eat Torah or Starve

Bringing this back around to Psalm 19:7, it seems that the NIV may do well with “refresh” here. Many commentators agree that the sense is one of enlivening a nearly dead person. But I want to go a bit further to suggest that the phrase is metaphorical, and is evoking food imagery. In other words, the law (tôrāh) is something to eat. Perhaps: “the law of the LORD is perfect, reinvigorating the famished.” Certainly to a physically starving Israelite facing the spiritual starvation of exile from God’s covenant blessings in the land, the law is the precise “food” needed to rejuvenate and survive. Of course, if the law is food, then the reverse implication of the food imagery in verse 7 is that disobedience leads to starvation.

That kind of image is not unprecedented. After all, God’s words had been long considered spiritual food for Israel, especially in times of suffering. As the nation wanders in the wilderness, they are called to remember that “man does not live by bread alone,” but by “everything that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD” (Deut. 8:3, NASB). God’s Word, his law, gives nourishment to the spiritually starved after disobedience and amid suffering. It revives the spiritually anemic (cf. Jer. 15:16; Ps. 119:103; Ezek. 3:1-3). Eat the law, Psalm 19 says. Consume the words of God, and live.

True Torah Gives Renewing Life to the Hungry

Someone else knew that man does not live by bread alone, even in his worst suffering and weakest physical moments (Mt. 4:4; Lk. 4:4). Indeed, he himself is the true Word of God (John 1:1). Jesus Christ does not abolish the law, but he fulfills it (Mt. 5:17). In doing so he is the perfect law of God incarnate. And he is the one whose perfect sacrifice and obedience has given spiritual life to God’s people in every age.

Only Jesus Christ can truly revive the inner man. “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. . . . For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (Jn. 6:53-54). Are you spiritually malnourished? Is your soul fatigued by wilderness? Or perhaps you have been eating the food of death—anger, pornography, sin. Consume him, and be rejuvenated. Feed on him by faith, be truly satisfied, and live.

William Ross is a doctoral candidate in Old Testament at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on Greek lexicography in the Septuagint of Judges, but his primary interests are the Hebrew Old Testament and biblical theology. He recently co-authored the Interpretive Lexicon of New Testament Greek (Zondervan, 2014), and also blogs regularly at williamaross.wordpress.com

Be Ready to Suffer

No only does Matt Chandler have biblical perspective on suffering he has lived it.

Thomas Watson on Hell

“Thus it is in Hell; they would die, but they cannot. The wicked shall be always dying but never dead; the smoke of the furnace ascends for ever and ever. Oh, who can endure thus to be ever upon the rack? This word ‘ever’ breaks the heart.” Thomas Watson

How People Read the Bible

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words.  Found this when looking for a quote.  Great picture! 

Seven Ways to Approach the Bible

From Christianity.com by Matt Smethurst.

If you’re a Christian, you believe reading the Bible is important. But how should you approach it in the first place? What kind of “heart posture” is necessary?

God cares deeply about these questions. Here are seven ways we ought to approach his Word.

1. Approach It Humbly

The Bible is empirical evidence that the Maker of the universe is a God who initiates, who reveals, who talks. There are, after all, only two options when it comes to knowledge of one’s Creator: revelation or speculation.

Either he speaks, or we guess.

And he has spoken. The God of heaven and earth has “forfeited his personal privacy” to befriend us through a book. The Bible is like an all-access pass into the revealed mind and will of God.

Now, given that we’re not only creatures of the dust but rebels against heaven’s throne, this is astounding. The King would’ve been entirely right to leave us to ourselves, sunk in an ocean of ignorance and guilt.

But he didn’t. He peeled back the curtain. And then opened his holy mouth.

Any authentic knowledge of God hinges on his generous self-disclosure to us. Only through his Word can we know who he is, what he’s like, what he demands, and how we may know him. This ought to humble us deeply.

2. Approach It Desperately

Having rehearsed God’s law one final time before his death, Moses looks at the people of Israel and says, “These are not just idle words for you—they are your life” (Deuteronomy 32:47). The stakes could not be higher. Not only are our spiritual lives launched by God’s Word (James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23), they are sustained by it too. As Jesus declared, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4).

The psalmist, too, ached to hear the words of God: “My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times,” he exclaimed. “I cling to your testimonies. . . . I open my mouth and pant, because I long for your commandments” (Psalm 119:20, 31, 131).

Your soul will wither and die without the Bible. Approach it desperately.

3. Approach It Studiously

Imagine if you asked me about my wife and I responded, “Oh, she’s incredible—the most amazing girl I’ve ever known! She’s from Oregon, has gorgeous red hair, and hates chocolate.” Now, would my chocolate-loving brunette who hails from Virginia feel honored by this description? Of course not. I can gush about her all day, but unless my words reflect who she really is, she’ll be insulted.

Why, then, are we so careless when thinking and speaking of our Creator?

“Great are the works of the LORD,” the psalmist exclaims, “studied by all who delight in them” (Psalm 111:2). The New Testament, too, commends engaging Scripture with care: “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11).

Come to the Bible with a learner’s posture, asking the Author to teach you wonderful things.

4. Approach It Obediently

The psalmist didn’t just long to understand God’s commands; he wanted to obey them, too.

You have laid down precepts that are to be fully obeyed. Oh, that my ways were steadfast in obeying your decrees! . . . Give me understanding, so that I may keep your law
 and obey it with all my heart. . . . I will hasten and not delay to obey your commands. (Psalm 119:4–5, 34,60)

The New Testament reinforces this urgency of submitting to Scripture: “Whoever says, ‘I know [God],’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person” (1 John 2:4–5). Or, as James simply urges, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22).

5. Approach It Joyfully

As a dad, I’m not always pleased when my kids obey me. They need to do so with a happy heart, too. Anyone can muster grudging compliance, after all, but real obedience flows from love and joy (John 14:15).

The Book of Psalms opens with a man whose “delight is in the law of the LORD” (Psalm 1:2). He can’t get enough of it. Likewise, the prophet Jeremiah confesses, “When [God’s] words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight” (Jeremiah 15:16). Even Jesus said the purpose of his words is to induce joy: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11).

Cracking open my Bible feels like a duty at times. It will for you, too. We’re fallen humans in a fallen world. When that moment arrives, though, press on. Press through. Ask for help. Plead for joy. It’s a prayer the Father loves to answer.

6. Approach It Expectantly

Since the Bible’s ultimate author is God, it is a book of unparalleled power. Its words can melt hearts (Jeremiah 23:29) and change lives (John 17:17).

Did you know even obscure books like Leviticus and Obadiah were written to encourage you? “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope” (Romans 15:4).Everything. Paul is saying that the entirety of the Old Testament is for you—to instruct you, to encourage you, to help you endure, and to flood your heart with hope.

When you open your Bible, do so expectantly. Comfort (Psalm 119:50), strength (Psalm 119:28), guidance (Psalm 119:105), hope (Romans 15:4), assurance (1 John 5:13), and transformation (John 17:17) everywhere await.

7. Approach It Frequently

It should be obvious, given everything we’ve considered, that we ought to approach God’s Word frequently.

“I rise before dawn and cry for help,” the psalmist proclaims. “My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promise. . . . Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:147–48, 97). In order for “the word of Christ [to] dwell in you richly” (Colossians 3:16), you must soak yourself in it like a teabag in water.

Friends, there is nothing like God’s Word. Approach it humbly, desperately, studiously, obediently, joyfully, expectantly, and frequently.

You’ll be so glad you did.

Matt Smethurst serves as associate editor for The Gospel Coalition. He and his wife Maghan have two children and live in Louisville, Kentucky, where they belong to Third Avenue Baptist Church. You can follow him on Twitter.