God wants every local church to be the first place people think to go when they've really messed up...not the last.
God is not interested in what you think you should be or feel. He is not interested in the narrative you have construct for yourself, or that others have construct for you. He may even use suffering to deconstruct that narrative.
There are a still lot of people in today's church who can easily identify the idolatry outside the church and are pretty proud of the fact that they are not like them. And yet, we are far too slow to recognize the idolatry inside the church and more painfully, the idolatry inside our hearts.
When we reduce the notion of “calling” to work inside the church, we fail to equip our people to apply their Christian faith to everything they do, everywhere they are.
I think there is tribalism is a big deal inside of the church, that the church thinks of themselves as a tribe and not a mission.
Because the church has moved away from the gospel anytime you move away from the gospel, you at the same time move toward pretense, you move toward image-keeping, you move toward the need to pretend.
My job as a pastor and theologian is to tease out the nature and the necessity of the gospel in meticulous ways, in everything I say, in everything I like. I want desperately for the church in America to rediscover the power and the beauty and the nature and the necessity of the gospel.
I think it's super important for the church itself to rediscover the gospel.
I actually think one of most profoundly and deep pastoral moments between a pastor and his church is what happens between them before God in the context of preaching.
