Update: New Blog address

Please change any bookmarks or link to alongobedience.wordpress.com

By now you have figured out that my blog address has change.  I was able get alongobedience.wordpress.com transferred into my name by a good Christian guy up in Boston.  He had this address for about a year but never got around to blogging anything so he graciously gave it to me.  I hope to be able to blog more in the coming weeks but being a tri-vocational church planter takes up a lot of time.  I hope to see many comments and discussion through this blog.  By doing so, help us at Redeemer Hill Church better reach the people of Hartford, CT with the gospel.

In Christ,

Joe Fisher

Local Churches: Do We Need Them?

(post originally by John MacArthur)

The New Testament repeatedly emphasizes the importance of local assemblies. In fact, it was the pattern of Paul’s ministry to establish local congregations in the cities where he preached the gospel. Hebrews 10:24-25 commands every believer to be a part of such a local body and reveals why this is necessary.

“And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:24-25).

It is only in the local body to which one is committed that there can be the level of intimacy that is required for carefully stimulating fellow-believers “to love and good deeds.” And it is only in this setting that we can encourage one another.

The New Testament also teaches that every believer is to be under the protection and nurture of the leadership of the local church. These godly men can shepherd the believer by encouraging, admonishing, and teaching. Hebrews 13:7 and 17 help us to understand that God has graciously granted accountability to us through godly leadership.

Furthermore, when Paul gave Timothy special instructions about the public meetings, he said “Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching” (1 Timothy 4:13). Part of the emphasis in public worship includes these three things: hearing the Word, being called to obedience and action through exhortation, and teaching. It is only in the context of the local assembly that these things can most effectively take place.

Acts 2:42 shows us what the early church did when they met together: “They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” They learned God’s Word and the implications of it in their lives; they joined to carry out acts of love and service to one another; they commemorated the Lord’s death and resurrection through the breaking of bread; and they prayed. Of course, we can do these things individually, but God has called us into His body-the church is the local representation of that worldwide-body-and we should gladly minister and be ministered to among God’s people.

Active local church membership is imperative to living a life without compromise. It is only through the ministry of the local church that a believer can receive the kind of teaching, accountability, and encouragement that is necessary for him to stand firm in his convictions. God has ordained that the church provide the kind of environment where an uncompromising life can thrive.

5 Dangers for Young Men – J.C. Ryle

by Mike Anderson (The Resurgence)

J.C. Ryle’s writing will punch you right in the face. He was an Anglican Bishop to the working class of Liverpool during the industrial revolution. He had tough words for tough people, and we could all use a bit of a challenge. I first learned about Ryle by listening to a Sunday school message he delivered. Ryle wanted the kids to know that they were accountable for their actions, so he told them the story of Elisha calling calling 2 bears out of the woods to kill some kids who mocked him. Could you imagine a little kid’s response to that? You can be sure Ryle will bring the truth, no matter how difficult.

5 Dangers from Thoughts for Young Men by J.C. Ryle

1. Pride
“Young men, take to heart the Scriptures just quoted. Do not be too confident in your own judgment. Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don’t trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives experience, and therefore deserves respect. “

2. Love of Pleasure
“Youth is the time when our passions are strongest—and like unruly children, cry most loudly for indulgence. Youth is the time when we have generally our most health and strength: death seems far away, and to enjoy ourselves in this life seems to be everything… “I serve lusts and pleasures:” that is the true answer many a young man should give, if asked, “Whose Servant are you?” “

3. Thoughtlessness
“Not thinking is one simple reason why thousands of souls are thrown away forever into the Lake of Fire. Men will not consider, will not look ahead, will not look around them, will not reflect on the end of their present course, and the sure consequences of their present days, and wake up to find they are damned for a lack of thinking.

Young men, none are in more danger of this than yourselves. You know little of the perils around you, and so you are careless how you walk. You hate the trouble of serious, quiet thinking, and so you make wrong decisions and bring upon yourselves much sorrow.”"

4. Contempt of Religion
“This also is one of your special dangers. I always observe that none pay so little outward respect to Christianity as young men. None take so little part in our services, when they are present at them—use Bibles so little—sing so little—listen to preaching so little. None are so generally absent at prayer meetings, Bible Studies, and all other weekday helps to the soul. Young men seem to think they do not need these things—they may be good for women and old men, but not for them. They appear ashamed of seeming to care about their souls: one would almost fancy they considered it a disgrace to go to heaven at all. “

5. Fear of Man’s opinion
“”The fear of man” will indeed “prove to be a snare” (Proverbs 29:25). It is terrible to observe the power which it has over most minds, and especially over the minds of the young. Few seem to have any opinions of their own, or to think for themselves. Like dead fish, they go with the stream and tide: what others think is right, they think is right; and what others call wrong, they call wrong too. There are not many original thinkers in the world. Most men are like sheep, they follow a leader. If it was the fashion of the day to be Roman Catholics, they would be Roman Catholics, if it was to be Islamic, they would be Islamic. They dread the idea of going against the current of the times. In a word, the opinion of the day becomes their religion, their creed, their Bible, and their God.”

Thoughts
Most young single guys spend their time playing video games, watching porn, drinking tons of cheap beer, and going to the Taco Bell drive-thru after midnight. Pastors—quit being wusses, and tell your young men that it’s time to grow up, quit living for themselves, and follow Christ.

Theology on Tap in Hartford, CT.

Theology on Tap is a place where anyone can come and participate in an informal discussion. Each month we have a different topic to discuss and February is no exception as we will be discussing Worship.  We will be meeting at City Steam in Hartford, CT on February 9th from 7-9pm.  Here are some of the question we will be thinking about and discussing.

1. What does it mean to worship?
2. What is idolatry?
3. Does it matter how you worship?
4. Is worship more than singing?

5. How do we worship God with our whole lives?
6. Is work worship?

7. Is worship more than Sunday morning?

8. Who or what is worthy to be worshiped? How do we decide?
Come and check out what we are doing and while you are with here enjoy good food, drink, and people.  See www.redeemerhill.org for parking info and maps. All parking is free on the street.  RSVP @ facebook.com/redeemerhill under events.

6 Study Essentials by Mark Driscoll

I saw this on The Resurgence website a while back and I thought about posting it.

1. Have a good Bible.

Every Christian needs a good Bible that they can easily read and enjoy. A translation such as the English Standard Version (ESV), the ESV Study Bible is very well done, or the New International Version (NIV) is preferable as your primary reading Bible, although there are many other translations that are also quite good (e.g., New King James Version, New American Standard Version).

2. Have some good Christian books.

If you want to build a reference library, the first book you should buy is A Commentary and Reference Survey by John Glynn by John Glynn. That book will tell you which other books are the best resources available for in-depth Christian study and anyone who is serious about studying should have a copy of this book.

3. Have some good (free) online study resources.

There are many great websites that can help you do Bible word studies and such for free. Good examples include the following, with the first one built and run by Mars Hill elder, Zack Hubert:

ReGreek specializes in word studies from the Bible ‘s original languages.
Crosswalk has many translations and Bible study tools.
Bible Gateway has many translations and Bible study tools.
CCEL has most of the major works from Christian history for free and a “Study Bible” feature that pulls up historical church commentary on specified verses.
E Sword has numerous Bible study tools.

4. Have some good Bible software.

If you can afford it, Bible study software provides some amazing resources and companies like Logos Bible Software are worth considering.

5. Have some good websites.

There are many great resources available for free on the web with articles, books, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, and MP3s. The following are some recommendations:

Desiring God is the website featuring a large repository of sermons and articles from my friend, Dr. John Piper.
Covenant Seminary has a “Free Downloads” link on their front page that will enable you to listen to hundreds of hours of their class lectures on many areas of Christian study. I am grateful to my friends at Covenant who have given the church such a gracious gift.
Mars Hill Church is where hundreds of hours of my teaching is available for free and has been the number one podcast on iTunes for religion and spirituality.
carm has good articles on cults, world religions, and apologetical issues.
equip.org has good articles, book reviews, and more, on cults, world religions, and apologetical issues.
www.christianitytoday.com/historyhas some great articles on Christian history and biography.
www.monergism.com has an almost overwhelming number of free articles on nearly every theological issue from a Reformed perspective.

6. Have some good community.

Most of the Bible was written to communities of people and is therefore best studied in community with other Christians. For this reason, getting plugged into a Community Group and/or taking midweek classes in addition to regularly attending a Sunday church service is essential.

Spread of the Gospel = Spread of Literacy and Education

This was taken from a post @ The Gospel Coalition

Christian mission does not get much respect in the academy or in the broader culture. Whether it is through the biased studies of someanthropologists or popular novels like The Poisonwood Bible, Christian missionaries are often caricatured as the “ugly American” and the entire missions enterprise is regularly maligned as unhelpful at best and culturally destructive at worst. Jesus said this kind of thing would happen (Matt 10:24-25), so we should not expect it to end anytime soon. But I think it is helpful to be able to point to a few of the many good things Christianity has brought with it wherever it has spread.

Dana Robert’s 177-page book, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion, does a lot of things (including a chronological and thematic study of 2000 years of Christian mission!). Along the way, Robert points out that Christian missionaries have done much good for the societies they have entered. The book could have fittingly been titled, In Defense of Christian Mission. Robert shows that missionaries have defended human rights, advocated for indigenous peoples, advanced women’s rights, improved medical care, cared for the weak and marginalized, and supported ecological sustainability and conservation.

One theme that appears throughout the book is that as Christianity has spread, so has literacy and education. Here are a few examples of this truth along with some of its consequences:

Christian Missions and the Advancement of Education

• “The first modern colleges and universities founded in India, China, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and Africa were the products of nineteenth-century educational missions. . .  . By 1935, missions were operating 57,000 schools and over 100 colleges worldwide” (50).

Christian Missions and the Education of Women

• “In many countries, missionaries were the first to insist on the education of girls, despite public opposition.” (50)

• In 1869 Methodist missionary Isabella Thoburn founded a women’s college in India – the first in all of Asia. (137)

• “By 1909 . . . American missionary women were operating 3,263 schools, ranging from primary level to colleges” (50).

• “By the early twentieth century, the majority of girls’ schools in Japan, Korea, China, and other locations, had been founded by missionaries despite social prejudice against women’s education” (136).

• “In China, Korea, and Japan, women trained in missions schools pioneered women’s higher education” (66).

Christian Literacy and the Preservation of Ethnic Identity

• In 314 Gregory the Illuminator (d. c. 337) became a bishop and established the church in Armenia. Soon after, “An Armenian script was developed for the purpose of translating the Scriptures.” In the early fifth century, “the patriarch developed an alphabet and assembled a team of scholars to translate the Bible . . . . With a national identity molded by the acquisition of their own written language, a written history, and Scriptures, the Armenians were able to maintain their ethnic solidarity over many centuries despite the loss of their political independence” (19).

• “In the late ninth century, the brothers Cyril (d. 869) and Methodius (d. 885) put the language of the Macedonian Slavs into written form, [and] translated the Bible into the language known as Old Church Slavonic. . . . [which] became the sacred language of Slavic Orthodoxy, and helped the Russians and other Slavic peoples to retain their identity despite the attacks of Tartars, Mongols, and others who sought to destroy them” (36).

• Protestant efforts in the sixteenth century to translate the Bible into the vernacular (rather than Latin) helped pave the way to the modern idea of nationhood and distinct cultural identities. “Unlike Islam, in which Arabic is seen to be the very word of God and the translation of the Koran is technically forbidden, Christianity delights in the translation of the Bible into languages that represent a multiplicity of cultural identities” (36).

• “What [the missionaries] offered – literacy, education, medical care, social services, support for individualism, and the gospel message – were tools that ultimately equipped indigenous peoples to challenge European empires on their own terms” (52).

Christian Literacy and the Advancement of Culture

• When unlettered, “barbarian” tribes of northern Europe invaded the Roman Empire in the fifth century, “with the help of church leadership, they acquired written scholarship” (21).

• As missionary monks spread out through Europe, beginning in the fifth century, they brought written language with them. “The literacy of monks meant they introduced the technologies of reading and writing into the oral cultures of Europe. . . . [M]onasteries became places where important Latin and Greek manuscripts were copied, and where oral traditions of the people could be preserved in writing. Without the writings of Christian monks, such pre-Christian classics as the poem ofBeowulf would not exist today” (26).

• “Former slave Samuel Ajayi Crowther (d. 1891), the first black Anglican bishop, made critical contributions to Bible translation that became the basis for Yoruba literature” (49).

Christian Missions and Western Understandings of Other Cultures

• John Eliot (d. 1690), a Puritan missionary to the Indians, translated the Bible into the Algonquin language, and published it “as the first Bible printed in North America” (42).

• Western missionaries helped Western societies come to understand and appreciate other cultures. For example, after Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg (d. 1719) took the gospel to the Tamil people of India, “A Tamil convert went to the University of Halle and began the first teaching of an Indian language in Germany. . . . Ziegenbalg, [who] produced a Tamil grammar for the aid of German students . . . . helped to spread positive ideas about Indian cultures among Germans” (42).

Mark Rogers is a Ph.D. student in historical theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL.

Theology on Tap – Art, Beauty, and Christianity

We at Redeemer Hill Church have a ministry called Theology on Tap.  We meet about once a month at City Steam in downtown Hartford, CT on Tuesday night (7-9pm) to talk about theology and different topics and issues in-regards to culture and the church.  Tonight we will be talk about Beauty, Art, and the Christian church.  Here is some of the informationan questions in tonights hand out.  For more info visit www.redeemerhill.org or facebook.com/redeemerhill

Art, Beauty, Aesthetics, and Christianity

Genesis 1:1

The Creation of the World
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:21
So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1:27
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Psalm 19:1
The Law of the Lord Is Perfect
To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above[1] proclaims his handiwork.

“Good taste in  poetry or music is not necessary to salvation”

~ C.S. Lewis

Enjoying Art to the Glory of God
As Christians seeking a better understanding of art and how we should think about it, we must remind ourselves that art is not a tool to be used in apologetics to get something. It is a thing to be enjoyed and pondered, and through that enjoyment and thought, we will find plenty to discuss with those who also find it enjoying or interesting. Dr. Schaeffer suggested: “The arts and the sciences do have a place in the Christian life – they are not peripheral. For a Christian, redeemed by the work of Christ and living within the norms of Scripture and under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the Lordship of Christ should include an interest in the arts. A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God – not just as tracts, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.“[1]This is profoundly important for the Christian to see. As Christians, we have the liberty to fully enjoy art as a way to glorify God.

Questions:

1. What has been the historical (ancient history and recent history) relationship between the church, art, and artist?
2. What is the current relationship like?
3. What needs to change?
4. Can we define beauty?  If so what is it?
5. How can art bring glory to God?
6. Can art be sinful?
7. Is there “Christian” art?
8. How can we partner with artist to use art to make Hartford a better and more beautiful city?

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[1] Schaeffer, F. A. 1996, c1982. The complete works of Francis A. Schaeffer : A Christian worldview. Crossway Books: Westchester, Ill.

Why a Long Obedience?

I have had many people ask me the reason for naming my blog A Long Obedience.  Just kidding no one has but I am sure people have wondered.  It comes from the title of a Eugene Peterson (author of The Message Bible) book entitled A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society.  I think it sums up the Christian walk of discipleship.  We, as Christians, want instant results in our relationship with Jesus, relationships with each other, and instant results in our evangelism to others.  Our expectations for everything from relationships to popcorn have been “microwaved”.  We have a hard time working on tasks or relationships that seem to take a lot of time and energy.  I think this is a large reason why many people divorce.  Our culture hides the work necessary to achieve results and so we expect results to just happen.

Here are some questions to think about and comment on:

1. Where in your life do you expect instant results?  Why do you expect them?
2. Have you considered the long obedience of the Christian life?
3. How can you sustain this long obedience over a life time?
4. How can you equip and encourage others to this life of discipleship?
5. What can we learn from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and His long obedience in the same direction?

Baby Joey

Well we do not have a name yet for our son who is due to be arriving on May 19th but here is a picture of him.

The World of Guyland

I just finished reading a recently published book called Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men by Michael Kimmel.  The books main purpose was to share the world of guy.  Not boys, not men, but guys.  Guys are basically defined as boys who shave and haven’t grown up yet to be responsible men.    Here is the description of the book:

To a growing list of books about the myths and mysteries of American boys and young males, Kimmel, a sociologist and author of Manhood In America, adds this deft exploration grounded in research. Based on more than 400 interviews, over a four-year span, with young men ages 16–26, Kimmel’s study shows that the guys who live in Guyland are mostly white, middle-class, totally confused and cannot commit to their relationships, work or lives. Although they seem baffled by the riddles of manhood and responsibility, they submit to the Guy Code, where locker-room behaviors, sexual conquests, bullying, violence and assuming a cocky jock pose can rule over the sacrifice and conformity of marriage and family. Obsessed with never wanting to grow up, this demographic, which is 22 million strong, craves video games, sports and depersonalized sexual relationships. In the end, Kimmel offers a highly practical guide to male youth.

One of the main ideas in the book is that being defined as a man has gone from a measurement based on what a man produces to a measurement based on what a man consumes.  Some examples of how the media plays to this (or defines it) are:  Drink this beer and you are a man.  Use this razor and you will be a better looking man.  Use this body spray and women will want you.  Drive this truck because real men do.  Women are no exception to this consumption lifestyle of manhood.  On many college campuses women are another commodity to consume.  The more women you sleep with the more of a man you are or become.  This is why it is called scoring.  The higher “scores” the more it defines you as being a man.

This is unacceptable!  Men need to be protectors of women, not predators.  How can we call men to be men?  How can we change this distorted view of manhood?  I would love to hear your comments.