Category: trevin wax

Posted in christian life, last things, prophecy, trevin wax

More on Eschatological Discipleship

Posted on by elizabethprata
Destruction of Jerusalem, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, 1860

Trevin Wax is author, speaker, blogger and one of the Editors of Lifeway. He is also a student and is busy finishing up his dissertation. He said on his blog recently that he plans to pause his blog in order to make time to finish his dissertation, which was on the topic of Eschatological Discipleship.

I was intrigued by this new term, because it seems that the emphasis and giftings the Lord has placed in me is aligned with this kind of discipleship. I mentioned Mr Wax’s term “eschatological discipleship” in a recent post. After that, I thought about it more and researched more.

I’m not talking solely about prophecy, though it is the foundation for this kind of discipleship. My goal has always been to quicken the hearts and minds of fellow believers to live increasingly holy lives in fervency and diligence in light of the fact that Jesus is coming again. Discipling people to be reminded of the King to whom we will face at a moment’s notice, the rewards that are laid up for us and which we store up ourselves as well, and the fact that the more we look up the better citizens of heaven we will be on earth for His kingdom and our fellow man. It’s to tell people, prophecy matters, because we are living it.

As Mr Wax had said in his summary of what eschatological discipling is,

Taking a Break and Asking for Prayer

The topic of my dissertation is “eschatological discipleship.” Following Jesus means understanding our times in light of the biblical vision of history and having the wisdom to make the right choices when the path ahead seems unclear.

Many gospel-centered folks are right to point out that the New Testament’s moral imperatives are often grounded in Christ’s finished work for us in the past. What we sometimes overlook, however, is how many of those moral imperatives also look forward to Christ’s return in the future. We are called to be “children of the day” in a world that knows only darkness.

The question that propels me forward is this:

What kind of discipleship is necessary to fortify the faith of believers so that we understand what time it is, we rightly interpret our cultural moment, and see through the false and damaging views of history and the future that are in our world?

That is the question I posed in my workshop at TGC this year: Discipleship in the Age of Richard Dawkins, Lady Gaga, and Amazon.com: Grounding Believers in the Scriptural Storyline that Counters Rival Eschatologies. (The audio from the talk is available here.) To be alert to our times is a gospel requirement, says Oliver O’Donovan:

To see the marks of our time as the products of our past; to notice the danger civilisation poses to itself, not only the danger of barbarian reaction; to attend especially not to those features which strike our contemporaries as controversial, but to those which would have astonished an onlooker from the past but which seem to us too obvious to question. There is another reason, strictly theological. To be alert to the signs of the times is a Gospel requirement, laid upon us as upon Jesus’ first hearers.

Mr Wax also mentioned this topic in an essay at The Gospel Coalition titled 4 Marks of Biblical Discipleship, of which eschatological discipling is one of the marks.

4. Discipleship is Eschatological
Discipleship is eschatological in nature, because the church that makes and receives disciples is eschatological in nature. By eschatology, I’m not referring merely to the “last things” doctrines often relegated to the back of systematic theology textbooks. I’m speaking of eschatology in a broader sense, as encompassing the Christian vision of time and the destiny of our world. Eschatology in this sense informs both our evangelism and our ecclesiology.
I love the picture Lesslie Newbigin paints:

“The church . . . calls men and women to repent of their false loyalty to other powers, to become believers in the one true sovereignty, and so to become corporately a sign, instrument, and foretaste of that sovereignty of the one true and living God over all nature, all nations, and all human lives.”

Seeing discipleship from an eschatological standpoint impacts the way we preach and teach. The alternative is to minimize the eschatological understanding of discipleship, which will leave us with an incomplete worldview, imbalanced discipleship, and eventually, a tragic inability to model the Christian way of life, since modeling implies obedience in a particular time and place.

Discipleship is eschatological, because questions like “What time is it?” and “Where is history going?” greatly impact a disciple’s worldview and inform what modeling a life of following Jesus looks like.

There are two aspects to our walk in the faith. One is that we as humans are living in a point in time. We have a birth date and a death date. Our walk with Jesus while in the flesh is finite. Esther was placed in the King’s life “for just such a time as this.” It was pivotal, her life began and ended and reached a climactic moment we all know occurred in Esther 4:14b.

Many gospel-centered folks are right to point out that the New Testament’s moral imperatives are often grounded in Christ’s finished work for us in the past. What we sometimes overlook, however, is how many of those moral imperatives also look forward to Christ’s return in the future. Trevin Wax.Yet, the other aspect of our existence is not a point in time but a person living in a stream of time in the past, present and future all at once. This mirrors the Lord “who was, who is, and is to come.” We were saved, we are being saved, and at a future time the salvation will be completed in glorification. It’s like we’re standing in a stream, with the current of all of time swirling by our feet. We look left, upstream and we see through our biblical lens the plan of God since Adam and Eve, and our feet are in the same stream of time that they are/were/will be again. Even Esther’s climactic moment was only part of a time-stream where if she did not act, “relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place.” (Esther 4:14a). The stream flows no matter what we do or what part of it we are standing in.

We look at our feet and see the fish we need to catch and so we are busy performing service to the Lord. Then we look downstream and we see the future. The stream flows but it curves and we cannot quite see what is ahead but we know there are currents and rapids and a waterfall, because we can hear them. We read the Bible and we can see ahead as far as the Lord allows by having given us glimpses from the Bible of where this great rushing stream of water is flowing to.

Wax: “eschatology…as encompassing the Christian vision
of time and the destiny of our world.”

What I gather Mr Wax is saying is that when discipling we always focus on the upstream, in looking at the past work of Christ. We also focus on our feet and fish for men and tend the creek where we are standing. However, we rarely tell our discipled members to look downstream at what is ahead. We say to the fisherman acolyte, “You don’t need to look ahead, where this great stream of time and plan of God is flowing isn’t important for catching fish today, here, now.” But it is.

Let me give a practical example of how John MacArthur eschatologically discipled his flock in this way. The Cripplegate summarized Dr MacArthur’s message We Will Not Bow, given last week.

Yet the thrust of the message was not condemnation. MacArthur clearly wanted to encourage believers, and so he ended with  2 Thessalonians 1:3-10.  In this rich passage, the Thessalonian believers are warmly commended for their “perseverance and faith” in the midst of persecution and afflictions.  Apparently this faithful congregation endured many hardships for the cause of Jesus Christ. Paul wants these believers to find relief in the doctrine of the second coming of Christ.  Paul tried to comfort the Thessalonians by assuring them that judgment will be merciless to those who reject the mercies of God in Christ.

The eschatological portions of scripture are given as a warning to the ungodly (Jude 1:7) and as comfort to the sheep not just in the coming rescue (1 Thessalonians 4:18) but we’re exhorted to find comfort in the fact that God will punish the wicked. (2 Peter 2:9).

Therefore we ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring.  This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering— since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven…  (2 Thessalonians 1:4-7a)

The relief spoken of is the coming of Christ in which one of His intentions is to repay and rectify all things. MacArthur finishes by saying:

The key here is at the beginning of verse 7, the middle of verse 7, “when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven.” That’s our focus. It’s ever and always the Christian’s hope. No matter how bad it gets, Jesus is coming.

Disciple your folks eschatologically, encouraging the brethren in the full sweep and scope of Christ’s plan on the earth and under the earth and in heaven. He was, and He is, and He is to come. He is our hope, He is our relief, He is our rescue, He is our Rock. Drink from that refreshing living stream.

“and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ. (1 Corinthians 10:4).

Posted in Burnout, Church Mothers, Discerning Women, discernment, encouragement, Michelle Lesley, prophecy, tower of babel, trevin wax

Gibberish, Discerning Women, Burnout, Church Mothers, Eschatological Discipleship

Posted on by elizabethprata

Around the interwebs, edifying and thought-provoking essays for your enjoyment.

What I been sayin,’ words mean things. Words matter. They really do.

I’d written back along,

Well, the second problem that ties back into the first (ecclesiastical feminism) is that words mean things. They mean things. Any liberal in any realm in the battle for hearts and minds will first seek to change meanings of commonly understood words in order to co-opt the meaning and then to redefine them to their advantage. Example: sodomite—->homosexual—->gay. In the church world, we no longer sin. We make mistakes. We’re no longer Christian. We’re Christ followers.

GIBBERISH 
Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

So. Words matter. Until they don’t. The ever-brilliant Carl Trueman writes about The Coming of Age of Today’s Gibberish whereupon an “Editor’s Note” attempted to say what certain words mean without being too specific about what they really mean. Like the word “woman” and menstruate”.

Editor’s note: This blog post refers to individuals who menstruate as women because the author wanted to highlight gender inequality in health care. We acknowledge that not all individuals who menstruate identify as women and that not all individuals who identify as women menstruate, but feel this generalization is appropriate considering the gendered nature of most health care policies. 

One might translate what the editor is really saying as ‘the concept of being a woman is now utterly meaningless but we have decided to preserve the fiction at those points where it is politically convenient for us to do so.’ Notice the editor’s use of the vague term feel and the slippery adjective appropriate. As ever, in our aesthetic age, it is impossible to argue against a feeling.

DISCERNING WOMEN

Here, Michele Lesley lists Nine Reasons Discerning Women Are Leaving Your Church and every single one is 100% a ‘hear, hear’.

The absence of discerning women in churches gives rise to many other problems. Godly mothers raise godly children, and absent discerning moms, the next generation of church life suffers. Elder discerning women have much to bring to the table (reason #7) in being the Titus 2:4 women teaching the younger. As discerning women leave churches the less discerning take over and soon you have the blind leading the blind. Third, the contributions to the faith of discerning women are without measure. Within our biblically prescribed roles, we see New Testament women advancing the Gospel and expanding the kingdom in myriad ways.

Priscilla and Aquila were discerning enough to see the potential in Apollos and taught him separately. Lydia’s home became a hotspot for prayer, teaching, and hospitality-fellowship. Dorcas gently led many women in a worthwhile sewing circle, teaching biblical principles by example.

On the other hand, you have a young and skittish and Rhoda who was so startled to see rescued Peter standing at the gate she shut it and left him there, believing the false but then-widely-popular notion that humans have a doppelganger angel, and that was who came to visit.

Soon, if not already, you will have churches that are absent your wise Priscillas, and Dorcas’ and Lydias and instead filled with foolish Rhodas.

Even though it is a bad thing that discerning women are leaving the churches, it is encouraging in a sense if you are one of the discerning women. At least you know you’re not alone in your concerns. Read Ms Lesley’s piece, it’s good.

While Scripture is pretty clear that we can expect women (and men) who are false converts to eventually fall away from the gathering of believers, why are godly, genuinely regenerated women who love Christ, His word, and His church, leaving their local churches?

BURNOUT

Other men and women are leaving due to burnout. Yikes, burnout is an epidemic, just at the time when we need good men and women ministering to the flock. Please, please avoid burnout. Please, please pray for your pastors and leaders.

Question: “What does the Bible say about burnout?”
Anyone who has experienced burnout knows it is not something he ever wants to experience again. Burnout is commonly described as an exhausted state in which a person loses interest in a particular activity and even in life in general. Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, social, and spiritual exhaustion. It can lead to diminished health, social withdrawal, depression, and a spiritual malaise. Many times, burnout is the result of an extended period of exertion at a particular task (generally with no obvious payoff or end in sight) or the carrying of too many burdens (such as borne by those in the helping professions or those in positions of authority, among others).

CHURCH MOTHERS
Photo by Alysia Burton Steele

An interesting peek at a part of Christian culture of which I have no experience and very little knowledge

Chronicling Mississippi’s ‘Church Mothers,’ and Getting to Know a Grandmother

Ms. Bearden and Ms. Floyd were part of a larger assemblage of 50 African-American women whom Ms. Steele had chosen to chronicle in text and image for a book-in-progress she has titled “Jewels in the Delta.” Whether by formal investiture or informal acclamation, nearly all the women in the book held the title of “church mother,” a term of respect and homage in black Christianity.

ESCHATOLOGICAL DISCIPLESHIP
Jesus giving the Farewell Discourse (John 14-17)
to his disciples, after the Last Supper,
from the Maesta by Duccio, 1308-1311

Trevin Wax is an Editor at LifeWay and is working on his doctoral dissertation. He wrote recently that his dissertation is on the topic of Eschatological Discipleship.” This is a topic near and dear to my heart, because it is exactly the focus of this blog. How are we to live, biblically, knowing of Jesus return? I’d observed that too many people, as Trevin wrote below, focusing on Jesus’ past work and avoiding the future promise of His return. Yet the Bible is replete with admonitions for living, encouraging, and a praying for the future deliverance via the promises of prophecy. This is what Trevin is writing about. Here is the excerpt from his longer essay which is mainly on other topics. He wrote that he is taking a break from blog writing to focus on his dissertation writing, whichis the topic of:

Eschatological Discipleship

The topic of my dissertation is “eschatological discipleship.” Following Jesus means understanding our times in light of the biblical vision of history and having the wisdom to make the right choices when the path ahead seems unclear. 

Many gospel-centered folks are right to point out that the New Testament’s moral imperatives are often grounded in Christ’s finished work for us in the past. What we sometimes overlook, however, is how many of those moral imperatives also look forward to Christ’s return in the future. We are called to be “children of the day” in a world that knows only darkness. 

The question that propels me forward is this: 

What kind of discipleship is necessary to fortify the faith of believers so that we understand what time it is, we rightly interpret our cultural moment, and see through the false and damaging views of history and the future that are in our world? 

That is the question I posed in my workshop at TGC this year: Discipleship in the Age of Richard Dawkins, Lady Gaga, and Amazon.com: Grounding Believers in the Scriptural Storyline that Counters Rival Eschatologies. (The audio from the talk is available here.)
To be alert to our times is a gospel requirement, says Oliver O’Donovan:

To see the marks of our time as the products of our past; to notice the danger civilisation poses to itself, not only the danger of barbarian reaction; to attend especially not to those features which strike our contemporaries as controversial, but to those which would have astonished an onlooker from the past but which seem to us too obvious to question. There is another reason, strictly theological. To be alert to the signs of the times is a Gospel requirement, laid upon us as upon Jesus’ first hearers.

I agree.

Enjoy the day today friends, look forward to the future and keep looking up!

Posted in false doctrine, therapeutic gospel, trevin wax

Summary of the Therapeutic Gospel: Trevin Wax’s "Counterfeit Gospels"

Posted on by elizabethprata

In listening to Todd Friel’s Drive By Discernment, lecture 55 and 55 today, I was introduced to Pastor Trevin Wax. He has written two books, one is called Holy Subversion and the other is called The Counterfeit Gospels. The two lectures in Drive By Discernment are on one of the six kinds of false gospels Wax writes about. It is called The Therapeutic Gospel.

Here is Pr. Wax being interviewed by Christianity.com on his book. Its short explanation offers an overview of the 6 false Gospels Wax identifies in his book. The 6 are,

1. The Judgment-less Gospel
2. Therapeutic Gospel
3. Moralist Gospel
4. Quietist Gospel
5. Activist Gospel
6. Churchless Gospel

Here is a chart summarizing the 6 false Gospels Wax writes about-

Source, The Gospel Coalition

In a session of the discernment series Drive By Discernment, Trevin explained “The Therapeutic Gospel”. We hear much of this Gospel today. It is all about us. It is about our self-esteem. our feelings. What God can do for us to make us happier.

I’ve included extended excerpts below, but understand that his 2 lectures totaling 30 minutes was tight, well-articulated, and built to a powerful point. It was hard to extract segments and have them make as much sense on their own than the entire lecture did. Even extended excerpts cannot do it justice. But here is a bit of what Pastor Wax said:

The Therapeutic Gospel at its root confuses spiritual symptoms with spiritual disease. Whatever it may be, a troubled marriage, maybe it’s anxiety, maybe it’s anger issues, perhaps an addiction, we take these symptoms and we confuse the symptoms with the disease – which is sin. Our own evil. Our rebellion. And because the diagnosis is superficial, the treatment is superficial as well.

So what are some of the superficial diagnoses we see in our world? Well here’s a few we can spot. One is the Happy Meal Gospel. … [He talks of his young son here] We realized fairly rapidly that it wasn’t the soggy McNuggets and the French fries that our son liked so much but it was enjoying but the happy meal toy and the playground. That’s what captures the heart of a child- promise the toy.

I’m concerned that we package the Gospel in a way that makes God out to be a Ronald McDonald type who wants to give kids a Happy Meal. … When ‘God wants me to be happy’ becomes the measuring stick for making our decisions, we have fallen for a counterfeit.

Here is the irony in all this- God does want us to be happy. The Therapeutic Gospel takes the right words and puts it in the wrong context. God does want our joy and happiness, but to be found in Him- not in a way that’s defined by 21st century American culture. God’s desire for our joy goes beyond the Happy Meal.

[In the emphasis on our feelings and the craze for preaching on self-esteem] Notice what has taken place. Instead of understanding that sin may lead to a lack of self esteem, sin has been re-defined as a lack of self esteem. See the difference? It’s subtle, but all counterfeits are subtle. It is a confusion of symptom as the real problem. … Scripture is clear, our biggest problem is not that we feel guilty- it is that we are guilty. We don’t have empty hearts in need of fill-up, we have deceitful hearts in need of replacement.

If low self esteem is the problem, then therapy is the solution. But the question for us as Christians is why does this version of Christianity need Jesus? Why is a bloody cross at the center of our faith? If our biggest need is for someone to tell us we’re all right, he could have sent Oprah. If our biggest need is to have peace in our family, then God would have done fine sending Dr Phil. No, God sent His son to die a brutal, horrifying death as a payment for human sin. Surely that is the sign that our sin is much more heinous than just, “We feel empty inside.” The Therapeutic Gospel can never deliver what it promises because it doesn’t recognize the severity of the problem.

The Therapeutic Gospel does something else that’s devastating. It leads us to believe that it is our worth that motivates God’s action to save us. The thinking is, Jesus came to save us because we are so valuable to God. There is some truth in this. We have an inherent dignity, because we’re created in His image. It is a true concept that has a gradual drift. It is more Gnostic than anything else. A good example comes from comparing two parables. [see below]

The true Gospel is Christ centered. The Therapeutic Gospel ultimately fails to satisfy because it switches out the great reward of knowing God for the lesser reward of receiving something from God.

Pastor Wax compares the subtle shift in a counterfeit Gospel from being Christ-centered to man-centered, by comparing the parable of the sheep as they are presented in Luke and in the false Gospel of Thomas. Here is the Gospel of Luke:

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. (Luke 15:4-7)

The other is from the non-canonical, false Gospel of Thomas.

“Jesus said, “The kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them, the largest, went astray. He left the ninety-nine sheep and looked for that one until he found it. When he had gone to such trouble, he said to the sheep, ‘I care for you more than the ninety-nine.'” (FALSE, NON-CANONICAL “Gospel of Thomas”)

What has happened here, said Pr. Wax, is that in the counterfeit Gnostic gospel the writer has shifted the emphasis. The point of the parable in the counterfeit is about the worth of the sheep, instead of the work of the Shepherd.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Christ is the ultimate possession. Nothing that the Therapeutic Gospel offers can ever satisfy. Anyway, consider this blog entry a kind of whetting your appetite for being on the alert for false Gospels. I’ve written and written about staying in the Word. Knowing His word in the bible is the best defense for spotting a false Gospel. Make sure you know the real thing!

Trevin Wax’s book is called Counterfeit Gospels.

Here is Tim Challies’ review of The Counterfeit Gospels.

Todd Friel’s Drive By Discernment is available on instant download, for $19.99. It contains 72 lectures that are under 15 minutes each.

Don’t fall for a therapeutic Gospel. Resolve to keep Jesus as the center of everything this year. With Jesus as your glory and your hope, it is the best start for the New Year and every year thereafter. Thanks to God’s grace, there will be an eternity of them for the believer.