Tag Archive - Cru talks

Jonah and the Gospel

March 16, 2011 in Ministry, Sharing with 0 Comments

One of my favorite gospel-centered stories in the Bible is Jonah.

Tullian Tchividjian calls it one of the best books for helping us get a better grip on the gospel.
This Spring I did a two week series at Cru on the book of Jonah (it could easily be taught over 4 weeks instead of 2).

In order to save you some time if you ever wanted to teach this book at your weekly meeting or Bible study, I wanted to share some resources on Jonah:

  • My Talk notes, slides, Sufjan song I used, and the intro and countdown video (all linked to below)
  • Links to help you research Jonah (also listed out below)

Some Key Points from my two talks on Jonah

Week 1 – We are Jonah (see full notes below)

  • Mark Driscoll – There is no way to understand the scriptures apart from these three questions

Who is God?
Who am I?
And what is repentance?

  • Jonah provides amazing insights into all three of these
  • Every year –In Jewish synagogues on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – the holiest and most solemn day of the Year for Jews, The book of Jonah is read each year. The congregation responds to the reading with the confession “We are Jonah.”
  • The book of Jonah is a mirror in which we are supposed to see ourselves.
  • We are Jonah.
  • When we ask the question, What kind of people run from God?
  • The answer is people just like us.
  • We are Jonah- being picked up by our shipmates. One guy holding our arms, another our legs, about to toss us over to die for our sin, our running from God, our self-righteousness
  • We are in need of rescue
  • As part of his prayer Jonah says to God: “You cast me into the depths, into the heart of the sea.” (2:4)  – it’s what he deserved
  • But in Yom Kippur, the High Holy day of the Jews, they do something interesting. They tack on a random passage to the end of Jonah – a small section at the end of the Book of Micah that uses almost identical language about our sins: “You will cast their sins into the depths of the sea”  (Micah 7:19)
  • How is that possible for Him to cast all our sins into the depths of the sea (instead of us)?
  • Tim Keller connects the dots in his new book King’s Cross (from Mark 4:35):

Mark has deliberately laid out this account using language that is parallel, almost identical, to the language of the famous Old Testament account of Jonah.
Both Jesus and Jonah were in a boat, and both boats were overtaken by a storm—the descriptions of the storm are almost identical.
Both Jesus and Jonah were asleep.
In both stories the sailors woke up the sleeper and said, “We’re going to die.”
And in both cases there was a miraculous divine intervention and the sea was calmed.
Further, in both stories the sailors then become even more terrified than they were before the storm was calmed.
Two almost identical stories—with just one difference.
In the midst of the storm, Jonah said to the sailors, in effect: “There’s only only thing to do. If I perish, you survive. If I die, you will live” (Jonah 1:12). And they threw him into the sea.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says, “One greater than Jonah is here,” and he’s referring to himself: I’m the true Jonah.

  • He was willingly thrown into sea in our place so Micah 7:19 might be true.

 

Week 2 – Revival starts when the good people realize their evil and turn to God (see full notes below)

  • We lack compassion because we don’t understand the gospel
  • God is a gracious God who saves evil people
  • So who are the “evil” people?
  • The word “evil” is used of Jonah just as many times as it is of the Ninevites
  • The gospel is only for sinners
  • Preaching it to ourselves every day reminds us that we are indeed sinners in need of God’s grace.
  • “Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.”
  • Tim Keller – “Jesus comes and says, I have nothing to say to you unless you understand that you stand in the same place morally before god as the murderer, the rapist”
  • John Wayne Gacy raped and killed 33 young men and was one of the worst Serial Killers in American History
  • Now I bring up Gacy, at risk of creeping many of you out. And let me warn you, the next 5-10 minutes will be VERY heavy.
  • I think Gacy is a modern equivalent of the Ninevites.
  • In order to understand Jonah (and his hatred for evil men like the Ninevites), to understand the Ninevites, to understand ourselves and to understand God, I think it would be instructive to look at the life of John Wayne Gacy, Jr.
  • Jony Wayne Gacy summed up his life to a friend: “”I do a lot of rotten, horrible things, but I do a lot of good things too.”
  • I want you to listen to one of my favorite artists, Sufjan Stephens, sing a song about John Wayne Gacy (lyrics here). Because he connects the dots from Gacy’s life to our life.

And on his best behavior
He’d kill ten thousand people

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid

  • So How does Revival Start?
  • When Bad people start flooding out of the bars into churches and Christian meetings?
  • No. It starts when “good people” turn to God in repentance
  • The reason the good news of God’s love hadn’t gone out in the city of Ninevah is the same reason it hasn’t gone out across the campus
  • God’s people don’t like the people that God loves and we are too self-righteous to see ourselves as no better than the people they have been called to bring the gospel to
  • God has sent us out to represent Him to the world – so that the world will be changed by the message of the good news of God’s unconditional love – but also so that we will be changed in the process – by the message of the good news . . .

 

Books/Articles/Sermons I used in teaching Jonah

Better than Any Fish Story - Tullian Tchividjian on the gospel in Jonah

Five questions with Tullian Tchividjian

  • Jonah video and graphics – great (free!) intro clip, countdown, powerpoint slides from Southeast church
  • John Wayne Gacy, Jr. – haunting song by Sufjan Stevens. Main idea – on our best behavior, there is still unfathomable evil in our hearts

Here’s my full notes and slides for Week 1

Download (DOC, 68.5KB)

Download (PPT, 507.5KB)

 

Here’s my full notes for Week 2 (be forewarned – week 2′s notes are a chaotic mess that I never fully organized into a good flow!)

Download (DOC, 70KB)

Download (PPT, 724.5KB)

 

Biblical Dating in a Hookup Culture

October 13, 2010 in Sharing with 0 Comments

This month I gave two talks on sex/dating.  I got great feedback on both of them (though the Dating talk solicited more) and wanted to pass them along to other campus ministers to hopefully save someone some prep time in the future.  Feel free to use them for whatever purpose you need.

Yesterday I summarized and gave downloadable notes/powerpoint from the Sex talk.
Today, the Dating Talk.

Summary Ideas:

  • You have to understand the sex/dating culture in which you find yourself to effectively fight upstream

    • College students live in a hook up and shack up culture.

  • Hook up:

    • Relationships are increasingly ambiguous
      • “Romantically, the lines between just met, just friends, something a bit more than friends, “Talking”, “going out”, “dating”, being boyfriend and girlfriend, sleeping over, cohabitating, and relating like married people can seem like passing through a series of gradually darkening shades of grey.”
      • “Such tendencies toward nebulous relations . . . leave emerging adult females [with] somewhat more investment than their male peers in getting clear on the nature of their relationships. But they also do not seem to feel empowered to demand that or to be up for challenging the larger amorphous relationships culture. Mostly they seem to simply go along and try their best to figure out what’s going on.”  Souls in Transition
    • Girls have been given the expectation that the very most they could or should expect from a guy is a hookup
    • From an eye-opening article in the very secular The Atlantic magazine: “Is it any wonder that so many girls are binge-drinking and reporting, quite candidly, that this kind of drinking is a necessary part of their preparation for sexual activity?  These girls aren’t embracing sex, all evidence to the contrary. They’re terrified of it.”
    • I showed a short clip from the MTV show The Hills where Kristin and Brody (pictured above!) painfully demonstrate this.  (Start at 14:20 End 15:09)
  • Shack Up
    • The vast majority of college students believe that cohabiting is a smart if not absolutely necessary experience and phase for moving toward an eventual successful and happy marriage
    • BUT  - “Studies consistently show that couples who live together before they marry are more, not less, likely to later divorce than couple who did not live together before their weddings”  - Souls in Transition

    So what is the Biblical Pattern?

    • Date to Marry (Dating is laying a foundation for a potential marriage which is obviously in contrast to our Hook Up culture)
    • No Sexual Immorality. Love Mark Driscoll’s thoughts on this: “Girls if his interpretation (of the Bible) ends up with you naked in bed, I would argue that he may not be the most objective theologian. I’d go with my interpretation which is: dump him”
    • Guys Initiate – from the first date, to DTR-ing, to setting physical boundaries
    • In dating, the man is demonstrating his ability to lead, protect, and provide.
    • The woman is discerning whether she will be well cared for and provided for, and whether she can follow his leadership. (I think that’s a quote from Mark Driscoll)
    • I ended this section with a 7 minute clip from Mark Driscoll’s excellent talk on Dating (Start minute 35:28 – End minute 42:30)

    %CODE1%

    Here are my notes (I probably cut out 10 minutes of this content b/c the talk had already gone close to 40 minutes, including the video clips):
    And the powerpoint:

    Sex and Dating Talks

    October 12, 2010 in Sharing with 1 Comment

    “Not only is God pro-sex, he explicitly uses sexual union
    as a metaphor for a believer’s union with God.

    In a very daring way, the Bible says that sex was God’s invention,

    to give us a sign of the Union that he built us for”

    (paraphrase of Tim Keller)

    I wish I could speak on Sex/Dating every week at Cru!  Such a critical topic for college students.  My prayer is that hundreds of future marriages will be affected as men and women learn to honor God in dating.

    This month I gave two talks on sex/dating.  I got great feedback on both of them (though the Dating talk solicited more) and wanted to pass them along to hopefully save you some prep time in the future.  Feel free to use them for whatever purpose you need.

    Today I’ll summarize and give downloadable notes/powerpoint from the Sex talk.
    Tomorrow, the Dating Talk.

    **Be sure to check out the phenomenal Matt Chandler clip at the bottom.  Amazingly good.**

    Sex -

    • Main Idea= Sex is the #1 reason students don’t want anything to do with God in college.

    From the book Souls in Transition: “One of the reasons why many emerging adults may want to distance themselves from religion is that religion in their minds conflicts with [their] lifestyle options.  Most of them want to party, to hook up and to have sex”

    Major Premise – Serious religion says sex is bad

    Minor Premise – I want to party and have sex

    Conclusion – I am not interested in serious religion

    • But ironically Sex/Desire is one of the greatest proofs that there is a God.  The “inconsolable longing” is what brought CS Lewis to Christ.
    • Most college students would say:

    “For right now I want to get a lot of that stuff out of my system, like messing around with girls and stuff, or partying.  You know, Get all that stuff out of your system before you get married.  Once you get married, you won’t be able to do all that stuff.”

    • The problem = that stuff doesn’t get out of your system.  Jesus says that “stuff”/sexual desire is internal and is a raging fire that will consumer your life
    • It’s not a switch you can turn off once you “Settle down”
    • This talk borrows heavily from Tim Keller’s two sermons (especially the former): Love, Lust and Liberation and Singleness
    • Some of the talk is verbatim from TIm Keller’s talk.  I type up many of my notes verbatim and then use them as jumping off points when I speak – using the ideas but putting them in my own words

    I ended the talk with this powerful clip from Matt Chandler where he tells the story of a pastor who passed around a rose that represented someone’s sexuality – and as it’s “passed around” and “handled” by everyone – it comes back to the front it’s used and broken.  One girl e-mailed me after the talk: “I broke down in tears when the clip ‘Jesus Wants the Rose’ was played and I have watched it over and over again in my dorm room.”

    Here’s my notes.

    Download (DOC, 60.5KB)

    For the powerpoint slides backdrops, I used the incredible (and free!) artwork from Southeast Christian Church. Here’s my slides:

    Download (PPT, 1.19MB)

    photo courtesy of steeljam