Starting this Sunday, Harbor Church will have two gatherings every Sunday at Liholiho: 9:00am and 10:45am.

Maybe you’ve been waiting to invite your friends to church, because the cafeteria, parking lot, and nursery were so full. Now there will be plenty of space for your friends to stretch out and get comfortable.

We’ll have a joyful time of worship, an engaging study of Matthew 21 (the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem), and plenty of time to talk story with all your friends at Harbor between services.

Who does God want you to invite by phone, text, email, iMessage, Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook today?

From Matt Chandler’s upcoming book, The Explicit Gospel:

The baptisms bothered me. One after another, each person stirred the waters and told some variation of the same story: “I grew up in church; we went every Sunday morning and night; we even went to Wednesday prayer, vacation Bible school, and youth camp. If the doors were open, we were there. I was bap- tized when I was six, seven, or eight, but didn’t understand what the gospel was, and after a while I lost interest in church and Jesus and I started walking in open sin. Someone recently sat me down and explained or invited me to The Village and I heard the gospel for the first time. I was blown away. How did I miss that?” Or they would say, “No one ever taught me that.”

I had heard all this before, but that night was the eve of the birth of our son, Reid. My daughter was three, and it hit me that my kids were going to grow up in the church. That night for the first time I asked the question, “How can you grow up going to church every week and not hear the gospel?” I quickly decided that these people had heard the gospel but didn’t have the spiritual ears to truly hear it, to receive it.

Fortunately, the Holy Spirit wasn’t going to let it go that easily. The question began to haunt me. I decided to have a few conver- sations and interviews with what we have called the “dechurched” men and women attending The Village. A few of them confirmed that my hunch was correct.They could go back and read journals and sermon notes from when they were teenagers or college stu- dents and see that they had indeed heard the gospel. However, what alarmed me most was the number of men and women who couldn’t do that.Their old journals and student Bibles were filled with what Christian Smith in his excellent book Soul Searching called “Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

The idea behind moral, therapeutic deism is that we are able to earn favor with God and justify ourselves before God by virtue of our behavior. This mode of thinking is religious, even “Christian” in its content, but it’s more about self-actualization and self- fulfillment, and it posits a God who does not so much intervene and redeem but basically hangs out behind the scenes, cheering on your you-ness and hoping you pick up the clues he’s left to become the best you you can be.

The moralistic, therapeutic deism passing for Christianity in many of the churches these young adults grew up in includes talk about Jesus and about being good and avoiding bad—especially about feeling good about oneself—and God factored into all of that, but the gospel mes- sage simply wasn’t there.What I found was that for a great many young twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, the gospel had been merely assumed, not taught or proclaimed as central. It hadn’t been explicit.

Today, millions of Christians and Catholics around the world began fasting in different ways for Lent. Why are we supposed to fast?

A few years ago, I heard a pastor speak on the topic of fasting at a conference. He gave a perspective I’d never heard before: you fast in order to build your resistance to temptation.

His reasoning was something like this: “If I can discipline myself to say no to food even when the deliciously tempting smell of my wife’s fresh-baked cookies comes wafting out of the kitchen, then I’ve won the battle over temptation. After that, when a delicious temptation for something much bigger like pornography or adultery comes, it’ll be no big deal to conquer.”

That pastor was Ted Haggard, who became the butt of late night jokes due to the spectacular failure of this approach.

If fasting is just part of some Christian self-help program that will make me a better person, then I’ve completely missed the boat. Fasting is not meant to increase my confidence in my own strength, but to help me realize that I’m absolutely strengthless without God’s wisdom and power guiding me. It’s to help me recognize that the worldly things I lean on (like food) are secondary to my dependence on God.

In the story of the rich young ruler we explored on Sunday, Jesus essentially asked him to fast from money and possessions as a way of demonstrating his dependence on God for his comfort, pleasure, and security, rather than depending on the things of this world.

Throughout the Old Testament, people fasted for the sole purpose of humbling themselves before God (see Psalm 35:13, 1 Kings 21:29, and Ezra 8:21). Unfortunately, this simple act of humility soon became a source of spiritual pride. By the time of Jesus, Pharisees were fasting twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays when everyone was in Jerusalem for market days. This gave them a nice big audience for the sackcloth-and-ashes competition in their weekly Mr. Zion Pageant out in the town square.

That’s why Jesus said in Matthew 6, “When you fast (not if, when), do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

With that in mind, here’s a simple guide to fasting:

• Find something to give up (food, TV, Facebook, whatever. Something you’ll actually miss).
• Without any moaning or groaning (I’m talking mostly to men here – we have a tolerance for pain that’s somewhere around that of a kindergarten girl), just do without it.
• Take the time when you would normally eat your plate lunch, or mindlessly scroll through Facebook timeline, and use it for prayer.
• When you feel hungry or bored, pray some more. Repeat as necessary.
• Expect the Father’s reward: a life that is more completely aligned with his will, and therefore more completely fulfilled.

A big welcome to Chris and Katie, who are joining Harbor’s ministry team. Chris will serve as Academic Dean at Antioch School Hawaii, our theological training program for pastors, church planters, and ministry leaders across the islands. He will also serve as Minister of Training and Discipleship at Harbor.

Chris and Katie have been married since 2001. They are both graduates of Northland International University, and Chris has an M.Div. from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in NT/Biblical Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School.They have 3 sons: Luke (age 7), Simon (3), and Elliot (1).

The call to ministry in Hawaii began for Chris during family trips to Hawaii in the mid to late 1990s. Following a couple of pastoral internships on Oahu during the summer of 1998 and 2000, he had plans to return to the islands after completing seminary. However, as God lead him toward more academic training, the call to Hawaii became less clear and delayed.

As plans took shape for the Antioch School Hawaii in the fall of 2010, it soon became clear to Chris and Katie that God was bringing them full-circle. They returned to Hawaii last week, moved into their new town home, and are now spending much time on Craigslist trying to furnish it! Welcome them when you see them.

Paul Tripp:

Things don’t go bad in a marriage in an instant. The character of a marriage is not formed in one grand moment. Things in a marriage go bad progressively. Things become sweet and beautiful progressively. The development and deepening of the love in a marriage happens by things that are done daily; this is also true with the sad deterioration of a marriage. The problem is that we simply don’t pay attention, and because of this we allow ourselves to think, desire, say, and do things that we shouldn’t.

Let me play out this life of little-moment inattention for you. You squeeze and crinkle the toothpaste tube even though you know it bothers your spouse. You complain about the dirty dishes instead of putting them in the dishwasher. You fight for your own way in little things, rather than seeing them as an opportunity to serve. You allow yourself to go to bed irritated after a little disagreement. Day after day you leave for work without a moment of tenderness between you. You fight for your view of beauty rather than making your home a visual expression of the tastes of both of you. You allow yourself to do little rude things you would never have done in courtship. You quit asking for forgiveness in the little moments of wrong. You complain about how the other does little things, when it really doesn’t make any difference. You make little decisions without consultation.

You quit investing in the friendship intimacy of your marriage. You fight for your own way rather than for unity in little moments of disagreement. You complain about the other’s foibles and weaknesses. You fail to seize those openings to encourage. You quit searching for little avenues for expressing love. You begin to keep a record of little wrongs. You allow yourself to be irritated by what you once appreciated. You quit making sure that every day is punctuated with tenderness before sleep takes you away. You quit regularly expressing appreciation and respect. You allow your physical eyes and the eyes of your heart to wander. You swallow little hurts that you would have once discussed. You begin to turn little requests into regular demands. You quit taking care of yourself. You become willing to live with more silence and distance than you would have when you were approaching marriage. You quit working in those little moments to make your marriage better, and you begin to succumb to what is.

Why do we quit paying attention? Because it is hard work to care, it is hard work to discipline ourselves to be careful, and it is hard work to always be thinking of the other person. Now, be prepared to have your feelings hurt: you and I tend to want the other to work hard because that will make our lives easier, but we don’t really want to have to sign in for the hard work ourselves. Oh, I’m not done! I think there is an epidemic of marital laziness among us. We want to be able to coast and have things not only stay the same but get better. And I am absolutely persuaded that laziness is rooted in the self-centeredness of sin. We have already examined the antisocial danger of this thing inside us that the Bible calls sin. We have already considered that it turns us in on our- selves, but it does something else. It reduces us to marital passivity. We want the good things to come to us without the hard work of laying the daily bricks that will result in the good things. And we are often more focused on what the other is failing to do and more focused on waiting for him to get his act together than we are on our own commitment to doing whatever is daily necessary to make our marriages what God intended them to be.

You can have a good marriage, but you must understand that a good marriage is not a mysterious gift. No, it is, rather, a set of commitments that forges itself into a moment-by-moment lifestyle.

There are many different ways different people view marriage.

• Many people in our culture see marriage as irrelevant. In 1970, 69 percent of twenty-five-year-old men and 85 percent of thirty-year-old men in America were married. In 2000, only 33 percent of 25-year-olds and 58 percent of 30s were. And the data says this trend is not slowing.
• Many people see marriage as a means of personal fulfillment. They believe marriage exists primarily for their happiness. Some single people might feel incomplete and unfulfilled, and think marriage will fill the hole they have in their heart. Married people realize it doesn’t completely fill that hole, and they get disillusioned with marriage because it doesn’t make them happy all the time.
• Some people see marriage mostly as a political issue. They say we should make more laws to defend traditional marriage, or they say we should get the government completely out of marriage, and let everyone decide for themselves what marriage should look like.
• Some people see marriage as a means of producing kids. Nobody goes into marriage for that reason, but many marriages dissolve after the kids all leave the nest. They send off their last kid to college, and they look at each other, and say, “Who are you again?”

In Sunday’s passage, Jesus called us to see marriage not as a political issue or a fulfillment issue, but as a deeply theological issue. A way for us to the unending love of God for his people through our unending love for each other. He confronted the tendency many people have to look for reasons to give up on marriage, and called us to look for reasons to sustain it.

In this video, John Piper, Tim Keller, and Don Carson (who have a combined 116 years of marriage) reflect on what they’ve learned from God’s Word and their experience about sustaining a loving marriage.

Get Jerry Bridges’ new book, The Transforming Power of the Gospel, for free today. Here’s the blurb:

The apostle Paul writes that we are to be transformed, but for many Christians, figuring out how to approach spiritual transformation can be elusive. Bestselling author Jerry Bridges helps us understand that we have available to us the ultimate power source for true spiritual growth: the gospel.

In The Transforming Power of the Gospel, Bridges guides you through a thorough examination of:

• what the biblical meaning of grace is and how it applies to your life
• how Jesus’ work in His life and death applies to the believer in justification and adoption
• why basic spiritual disciplines are necessary for spiritual growth
• what role the Holy Spirit plays in both definitive and progressive sanctification

Lot is called “righteous” in 2 Peter 2:7, but the story of Genesis tells us that he was a sinful man who offered his virgin daughters up to be sexually abused by riotous crowds. So which is it? Was he righteous or sinful?

Our incoming Minister of Discipleship and Training (and Academic Dean for Antioch School Hawaii), Chris Bruno, answers:

We can see in Genesis 19:29 that God’s faithfulness to the Abrahamic covenant was the deciding factor in Lot’s rescue. We know that, according to Genesis 15:6, God justifies, or makes righteous, those who have faith in his promises. So then, we can infer Lot’s righteous status from Genesis. As a consequence of this, we can assume that, just as Abraham’s obedience in the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 was a result of his righteous status, Lot’s righteousness should also lead to obedience. Genesis leaves us wondering whether and how this might have happened.

But 2 Peter 2 confirms that Lot was indeed righteous and fills out how this righteous status affected him. He was troubled by the sin he saw around him in Sodom. However, this was not the foundation of his righteousness, but rather the result of it. Both his righteousness and ours, as 2 Peter 1:1 reminds us, is finally and fully predicated on the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.

It seems that the only way to affirm both the account in Genesis 19 and the teaching of 2 Peter 2 is to read both in concert. And when we are reading these texts canonically and Christologically, the pieces fit together in such a way that they can only lead to one conclusion: Lot was simultaneously righteous and sinful.

And more often than I’d like to admit, I act like Lot did. I am indeed troubled by the sin I see around me in the world. But far too often, I end up responding to the sin I see around me the same way that Lot did—by sinning myself. My guess is that many Christians share this experience.

But like Lot, I have also been declared righteous. Not because of what I have done, but because of what Christ has done for me. And at the end of days, I will be proclaimed righteous because I have been united to the true Righteous One. No person is proclaimed righteous apart from Christ, but all who are in him are declared righteous along with him. This is how Lot could be righteous even in the midst of his sin. So then, 2 Peter 2:7 is a testament to audaciousness of the gospel—Peter could call a man with so many obvious flaws Righteous Lot because of the promise to Abraham. And if we are in Christ, then God has rescued us as well because he remembers his promise to Abraham.

Our church is 39 days into our yearlong Bible-reading challenge, and now is the time when the fatigue of reading four chapters a day starts to set in. How are you going to keep going?

Jaw-clenched discipline might be enough for some people to make it through, but there’s a better motivation: learning to see and savor the good news of the gospel in every chapter you’re reading, no matter how dry and irrelevant it might seem at first.

An excellent new aid for this is a book by Michael Williams, called How to Read the Bible Through the Jesus Lens. Here’s how Justin Taylor describes it:

Average Bible readers like me want to answer three overarching questions when they read God’s Word in reading God’s word:

• What’s the big idea in each book?
• How does each book point to Jesus?
• And how does each book speak to contemporary life?

In this concise and well-written book, Michael Williams deftly guides us to the right answers. Few books do a better job of giving us an overview of Genesis to Revelation in such a compact way. This is the sort of book I’d love to have in the hands of every member of my church!

Read it now on your Kindle.

More Stones for the Temple

You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house,
to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices
acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. [1 Peter 2:5]

God is good. He has brought many new people to our church over the last few months, including many people who are coming to know his glory and grace for the first time. In response to this growth, Harbor’s elders have decided to launch a second Sunday gathering.

Beginning March 18, our Sunday gatherings will be at 9:00am and 10:45am at Liholiho School.

Some expected questions about this decision are answered below.

Why should we desire numerical growth?

• We want to introduce more people to God’s glory and grace in Jesus the Messiah. We are currently limited to 170 adults on Sunday mornings, and we don’t want to cap the number of people God can reach.
• Revelation 7:9–10 says, “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
• We want to give people a preview of this future reality in our church. We also want our church to grow so we can send and support more church planters and missionaries to bless the islands and the nations, gathering even more worshipers to the throne.
• We need to avoid giving our preferred church size a moral status. The first-century church in Rome was a small house-church, while the church in Jerusalem numbered in the thousands. Both were faithful and fruitful gospel communities. Different sizes are different, not inferior.

Why should we add a second Sunday gathering?

• Sociological studies show that when a room is 75% full, it feels full. People are less likely to invite friends when they will need to squeeze in and feel uncomfortable.
• The cafeteria has been consistently 75%-95% full for the last 6 months (aside from the transient month of December). We’re also out of space in the nursery and parking lot.

Why not just move to a bigger facility?

• Missional Reasons. We have a wonderful partnership with Liholiho that we don’t want to give up. We constantly hear what a blessing we are through our presence on Sunday mornings and especially through our ministry to staff and students.
• Ministry Reasons. We want to bless kids’ ministry workers. They currently miss the service once a month, but now will be able to serve in one service and attend the other.
• Pragmatic Reasons. All the suitable facilities available within a 5-mile radius would raise our monthly rent by $1500-$2000.
• Evangelistic Reasons. Having more service time options means more potential people can attend, due to different work schedules and personal preferences . This means more people who can come experience the gospel in our words and deeds.

What challenges will we face?

• Losing simplicity. Each Sunday morning ministry will become more complex. It will demand greater sacrifice from current workers, and will require more leaders and volunteers. But when we were called into the Kingdom, we were called to come and die, not to come and be comfortable.
• Losing family feel. We won’t be able to see everyone in the church all at once. But with the extremely irregular schedules of a large number of people in our church, we already don’t. Also, sociologists say we can only really know about 60 people (most tribes are that size), so in actuality the sense of family is already gone.
• Ministry growing pains. As the church grows, it’s easier for people to fall through the cracks. With more volunteers and leaders, it might be assumed that “somebody else will do it.” With ministry teams expanding, it might be easy to assume bad motives of fellow leaders and workers you don’t know well. We’ll address these dangers with the priorities below.

What will be our priorities through the transition?

• Glory to God. ”To him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations.” [Ephesians 3:20-21] We will do nothing just for the sake of doing it, only to display the glory of God to our church and community.
• Love for each other. ”Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” [1 Corinthians 13:7] “In addition to bearing all things, love also believes all things. Love is not suspicious or cynical… If there is doubt about a person’s guilt or motivation, love will always opt for the most favorable possibility. If a loved one is accused of something wrong, love will consider him innocent until proven guilty. If he turns out to be guilty, love will give credit for the best motive. Love trusts; love has confidence; love believes.” [John MacArthur]
• We will make the following commitments:
• I will believe the best about my brothers and sisters in the church.
• When other people assume the worst about you, I will come to your defense.
• If what I experience begins to erode my trust, I will come directly to you to talk about it.

The minds of the disciples were bent like cafeteria sporks when Jesus was transfigured on the mountaintop, and his “face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.” (Matthew 17:2). They couldn’t understand how someone so obviously powerful and glorious would willingly go to Jerusalem, to be killed by his enemies.

They were tempted to just give up trying to understand, as when Peter tried to persuade Jesus to stay on the mountain and forget about the whole death thing. Eric McKiddie explains how we often try to avoid hard truths in a similar way:

We often use the “we will never fully know” excuse to marginalize the practical value of certain theological topics. This trump card brings to a screeching halt conversations about eschatology or the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom.

But just because we can’t fully know something, does that mean we shouldn’t learn as much as we can about it?

Speaking of how the divine Son was able to be incarnated into fallen flesh, T.F. Torrence says, “Here we are faced with something we can never fully understand, but it is something that we must seek to understand as far as we can” (Incarnation, 62).

We must seek to understand it as far as we can. Even though some theological topics contain more mystery than others, there is always more that we can understand about them.

Do you experience awe and amazement every day? According to Paul, living in wonder of God’s glory should be an ongoing experience:

We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18)

 
So why don’t we experience God’s glory all the time? Paul Tripp explains: 

You and I were created to live our lives in the shadow of awe. Every word we speak, every action we take, every decision we make, and every desire we entertain was meant to be colored by awe. We were meant to live and minister with eyes gazing upward and outward. We were meant to live with hearts that are searching, hungry, seeking satisfaction, and being satisfied. Bad things happen when we look around and nothing impresses us anymore.

Sins rob that sense of divine wonder meant to shape every person’s life and every pastor’s ministry. When it does, you look for ways to fill the void. Now think about it: if you are not getting your wonderment vertically—that is, from the Creator—then you will look for it somewhere in the creation. You will be shopping for the buzz of wonder where it simply cannot be found. Your friends and family cannot give you the awe you seek. That new restaurant will blow you away, but it won’t introduce you to the heart-satisfying wonder of God. That new car will make you happy for a while, but it doesn’t have the capacity to fill your soul with glory. That certain ministry success will not satisfy your heart.

“Truly God is good to Israel.” (Psalm 73:1)  

The Psalmist here gets at the dilemma in a single word: good. You’re looking for pure, unadulterated, imperishable, unending, and unfailing good, because you’re wired that way. You’re looking for the kind of good that can lift you out of your boredom and quiet your longings. And that good can only be found one place: God.

God is good in every possible way. He is good in righteousness. He is good in power. He is good in grace. He is good in his faithfulness. He is good in mercy. He is good in holiness. He is good in justice. He is good in his rule. All his words are good and true. All his actions are good and right. When he is angry, he is good. When he preserves life, he is good. When he takes life, he is good. When his words are hard, they are good. When his words are gentle, they are good. His promises are good. His provisions are good. His plan is good. In all of the universe, you can only say this about God: he is good all the time and in every way.

Think about it. The One who is the sum and definition of all that is truly good has placed his goodness on people like you and me, people who get numbed by busyness and familiarity. Now that’s a reason for AWE!