A minister who preaches only the facts of the Gospel and fails to preach the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is not fully proclaiming the Gospel, noted pastor and author John Piper said Thursday during chapel service at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Preaching from 2 Corinthians 4:1-7, Piper said proclaiming justification, forgiveness of sins, redemption, reconciliation and other cardinal Gospel doctrines is not a complete expression of the good news unless such preaching seeks to stir up in people a profound desire to seek and savor Christ as their ultimate treasure, Piper said.

“There is not a more important phrase in all the Bible than ‘the Gospel of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,’” Piper said. “There is nothing bigger, better, higher beyond Christ, gloriously seen, savored and satisfying forever. There is nothing beyond it. Everything else in the Gospel is a means to this, but this truth is not the means to anything.”

Piper serves as the pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church. A popular conference speaker, Piper is the author of more than 20 books including “God is the Gospel,” “Desiring God,” “Future Grace” and “Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ.” He preached at Southern on March 27 and 29.

The goal of the Gospel is the glory of Christ who is Himself the image of God, Piper said. The goal of the Gospel is not only forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God, taking away God’s wrath and escaping hell he said; the goal of the Gospel above all else is to create a hunger in the human heart that is satisfied by Christ alone.

“When you preach the Gospel, people should see the face of Jesus,” he said. “That is what satisfies the soul forever. When the Gospel is preached, there is a light radiating through the preaching of the event (of the cross), the accomplishment of redemption and the offer (of salvation). There is a light shining when it is preached.

“Getting out of hell is not the Gospel; it is a means to it. Getting your sins forgiven is not the Gospel ultimately; it is a means for the good news that makes a person say, ‘I see Him, I will have Him, I will enjoy Him forever.’ So when you preach, get there every time.”

Piper defined “lostness” as a blindness to God’s glory. A person is lost when he does not view Christ as his greatest treasure, his pearl of great price, Piper said.

“This is why we (Gospel ministers) exist,” he said. “We exist to try and change that through the preaching of the Gospel. We know people like this, people who are blind to the glory of God in Christ; some of you in this room are this.”

Conversion happens when the Holy Spirit applies the truth of the Gospel to a sinful human heart and causes it to see the infinite beauty, majesty and value of Christ and to treasure the glory of God above all else, Piper said. The preacher proclaims the Gospel, but he reminded students that it is God who sovereignly saves.

“When you were converted, light happened,” he said. “You once thought Jesus was boring until God said, ‘see!’ Then you no longer thought Jesus was boring. You were awakened from the dead by God...Because salvation is totally God’s work.”

While ministers do not save anyone, they are indispensable agents in the spread of the Gospel, Piper said. He admonished students to preach the Gospel with the aim of seeing the Holy Spirit light hearts aflame with a passion for the glory of God.

“The human commission is to liberate them (lost people) from darkness and the devil,” Piper said. “Isn’t it amazing? You are called to do what only God can do. You will be God’s decisive, indispensable agents of God in this work.”

God’s minister must not only preach the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, but he must also demonstrate to others through humble service that Christ is his ultimate, all-satisfying treasure, he said.

Piper argued that both humble service and Gospel proclamation by God’s ministers reconcile the twin teachings of Matthew 11:30—where Jesus tells believers that His yoke is easy and His burden light—with Matthew 16:24, where Jesus commands believers to take up their cross and follow Him. The congregations of pastors who exhibit both traits will follow such a leader, he said.

“You get down low and serve people because they need to see that He has satisfied you in His glory,” he said. “When they see a big Christ and they see us down low, they will listen, but they must see both.

“Be faithful to biblical texts. Let these little old ladies know that you will be there at their funerals and at their kids’ funerals and at their bedsides and you will serve them at great cost to yourself and lift up a big, glorious, all-sufficient, all-satisfying Christ and they will follow you.

“How can the cross bearing be a light load? The only answer I have right now is the cross is the pathway to and the revelation of the all-satisfying glory of Christ.”

The audio to both of Piper’s sermons is available online at http://www.sbts.edu/resources/Audio_Resources/Chapel_Messages/Spring_2007.aspx

Sgt. Yoon Jang-ho, a former student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, became the first Korean soldier since the Vietnam War to die in a foreign conflict when he was killed in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb Feb. 27.

Yoon, 27, attended Southern for one semester in 2004 before returning to his native country to enter the military out of a sense of national duty. Yoon’s death occurred just two months before his tour in Afghanistan was scheduled to end.

“He didn’t have to go into military service, but he just felt by himself that it was kind of a national duty,” said Barnabas Kim, a friend of Yoon’s at Southern and master of divinity student from Korea. “So he joined the military in 2005.”

Yoon planned to return to Southern in the fall and study to become a youth minister, Kim said.

“He was very quiet, and he was very artistic,” he said. “He liked drawing and playing music. He was a very faithful guy as well.”

A member of the Korean Army’s Dasan Engineering Unit, Yoon volunteered to serve in Afghanistan though he had opportunities to be deployed elsewhere.

Yoon has been mourned by thousands in Korea, according to Don-A Ilbo, a Korean news organization.

His March 5 funeral in Korea was attended by several Korean government officials including the senior presidential secretary for security policy, the defense minister and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yoon was buried in the National Memorial Cemetery in Daejeon.

Yoon’s parents, Yoon Hee-cheol and Lee Chang-hee, are strong Christians and trust in God despite their son’s death, Kim said.

“Yesterday I called his parents,” he said. “His father and mother are very good believers. One great thing is that they said they still absolutely believe in the sovereignty of God. They think things are in God’s control, and they believe there is some reason God has allowed this thing to happen.”

In ministry Yoon had a passion to develop international churches where people of many nationalities could come and worship together, Kim said.

“He had a vision for an internationalized church, not just one language or denomination,” he said.

Korean students at Southern are sending notes of encouragement to Yoon’s family in Korea and request continuing prayer for the Yoon family.

“He was the youngest guy in our group of Korean students, and many students considered him a younger brother,” Kim said. “So he had a really good time here.”

Students should pray that the members of Soulforce—a gay activist group that staged a protested at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Monday—find salvation in Christ, said President R. Albert Mohler Jr. during Tuesday’s chapel service.

Mohler led students and faculty members in prayer for the salvation of members of Soulforce some 24 hours after 22 of its members staged a sit-in in the lobby of the president’s office. Soulforce is an activist group that employs nonviolent means to call religious groups who view homosexuality as sin to accept as normal the gay, lesbian and transgender lifestyle.

The group is on a two-month bus tour across the nation protesting on the campuses of conservative religious schools. According to its website, the tour was scheduled to visit Union University in Jackson, Tenn., on Monday, but detoured to Louisville to protest a March 2 weblog in which Mohler discussed homosexuality and biology.

Members of the group demanded to meet with Mohler. Seminary officials refused their request, but received an official statement from a Soulforce spokesman. Afterwards, 10 protesters filed out of Norton Hall and remained for a time on a public sidewalk, while a dozen refused to leave seminary property and were arrested on charges of criminal trespassing.

Mohler explained to students the seminary’s response to the activists, adding that the protest was purposefully orchestrated to gain media attention. Any institution that seeks to faithfully proclaim the Word of God should expect to meet with strong opposition from the secular culture, he said.

“These are difficult days and they are only likely to get more difficult,” he said “We are given every once in a while a foretaste of what is likely to come. I can only say that I believe any ministry that stands upon biblical authority and actually applies the whole counsel of God to all of life is going to confront moments like these.”

Mohler said such challenges should not deter Christians from speaking the truth.

“We should always be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us. We should always be ready to speak on behalf of Christian truth, on behalf of the truth of God’s Word. We should always, above all things, be ready to speak about the Gospel.”

During the chapel service, a number of students and faculty prayed aloud for the salvation of Soulforce members.

Mohler encouraged the seminary community to continue to pray for Soulforce and admonished students and faculty to remember the sinfulness out of which Christ has saved each of them.

“The only way we have come to Christ is that we have come to desire something far more than we desire our sin,” he said. “We need to pray for their salvation, not merely their salvation from homosexuality, but their salvation from sin and death, the salvation by God’s grace that we have come to know—a salvation from sin equally as ugly, equally as deadly.”

Longtime Southern Baptist pastor and leader Jerry Vines challenged students to maintain their personal walk with God through seminary and preach the whole counsel of the Word of God during a chapel service March 20 at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Using the entire book of Jonah as his text, Vines urged students to learn from Jonah’s experience and submit to the will of God for their lives. Vines noted that though Jonah knew God’s will, he rebelled against God.

Vines said the early portion of Jonah depicts the reluctant prophet as an escapist who is running from God.

“It says in Jonah 1 that the Word of the Lord came to Jonah,” he said.

“God sends special people to special places for special purposes. The call of God on Jonah’s life was to go and preach to Ninevah. Jonah knew that inherent with preaching comes the possibility that people might repent of their sin. Jonah did not want this, and instead of arising and going to Ninevah, he arose and went to Tarshish.”

The sermon was part of the annual E.Y. Mullins Lectures on expository preaching. Vines is president of Jerry Vines Ministries and is a two-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention. A noted author and speaker, Vines also served as pastor of First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., for 24 years before retiring in February of 2006.

Vines said that though Jonah knew he could not escape the presence of the Lord, he still attempted to get away. However, God reigned in His rebellious prophet.

“The Bible says the Lord assigned the big fish to swallow Jonah,” he said. “We are dealing with a miracle here. The Lord prepared this fish to be a prison house for Jonah. R. T. Kendall says this fish was not a pleasant place to live but it was a good way to learn. If you run from God, you will find yourself in a whale of a mess, maybe not in the belly of a whale, but in a situation just as severe.”

In chapter two, we see Jonah turn into a biblicist who is running to God, Vines said. Like the prodigal son in Jesus’ New Testament parable, Jonah turned from his rebellion in humble repentance, Vines noted.

“Jonah made the best decision of his life in the worst place of his life,” he said. “Jonah begins praising God for his deliverance and declares that salvation is of the Lord.”

Vines said that according to Hebrew scholars, Jonah’s prayer included eight to 15 references from the Psalms, which suggests a pattern for our prayers.

“The Bible gives point and passion to our prayer,” he said. “The Bible activates our prayer and prayer applies our Bible.”

Quiet times should include two elements: the Word of God and prayer, Vines said. He challenged students to be serious about their devotional walk with God during seminary because preparing for ministry can be spiritually draining.

“As a student in college, I studied my Bible to take examinations and read Scripture for the purpose of testing,” he said. “I was not reading the Bible for my own spiritual growth, and I became cold in my heart toward God.”

After repenting, Jonah is restored by the Lord in chapter three and becomes an evangelist running for God, Vines said. When Jonah submitted to God’s call and went to Ninevah he didn’t declare a story of his own creation, but preached a message from the Lord, Vines said, which should be instructive for Christian ministers.

“It is not for us to derive our own message from our own minds,” he said. “The Bible says in 2 Timothy 4, ‘I charge you before God ... preach the Word.’ That is the command of the Bible. You are accountable before God for your message. He gives us the message. We don’t make up the message.”

After declaring the Lord’s judgment against Ninevah, Jonah went outside the city to wait for the result. Upon hearing of Ninevah’s repentance, the prophet became angry with the Lord, turning into a nationalist who, instead of running with God, was running into God, Vines said.

“Jonah says to the Lord, ‘I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. I knew that you were a compassionate God and that you would forgive them,’” he said. “It is not that Jonah did not want the Lord to be compassionate it is just that Jonah only wanted the Lord to do that for Israel.”

While the Bible is silent on Jonah after this account, Vines speculated that the prophet eventually repented again and became an apologist who ran with God. Vines challenged seminary students to do the same throughout their lives and ministries.

Contemporary terms like “buddy” and “pal” used to refer to Jesus do not show appropriate reverence to the One whom Scripture describes as the King of glory, Danny Akin said at a chapel service March 8 at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Preaching from Psalm 24, Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the passage teaches that God is holy and sovereign and should not be approached lightly. Akin is president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. He served as dean of the School of Theology at Southern Seminary from 1996-2003.

“We need to be reminded in our culture today, and even in our churches today, that God is not some cosmic cheerleader committed to your happiness and self-fulfillment,” he said. “God is not your buddy. Jesus is not your homeboy. To call Him your homeboy is disrespectful and rude and indicates that you have not yet comprehended the greatness and the glory of this One who died for you.”

Akin said Psalm 24 is the third in a series of Psalms that revolve around the Messiah King, Jesus Christ. Psalm 22 defines Jesus as the suffering King, Psalm 23 reveals Him as the shepherd King and Psalm 24 teaches that Jesus is the sovereign King, he said.

Over what is Jesus sovereign? All things, Akin said.

“Anything and everything belongs to the Lord. All people and every single thing is His,” he said. “He stamps everything with the word, ‘mine.’ And everything is rightly His because He made everything out of nothing by His own sovereign will.”

As Creator, God defines the terms by which people may enter, and remain, in His presence, Akin said. This passage reveals four qualities that must characterize people who would ascend God’s holy hill, Akin said.

“Number one, he must have clean hands. He must be free from guilt,” he said.

“Second, he must have a pure heart, he must be blameless, free even from impure motives, thoughts and emotions. Third, he must not lift up his soul to an idol, meaning he must not worship an idol. Fourth, he must not swear by what is false, that is, there must be no deception or false motives in his heart. He must know nothing of dishonesty or deceit.”

Akin noted that only Jesus Christ perfectly meets these requirements, thus only Jesus is worthy to enter God’s presence. However, through Jesus’ atonement and sacrifice on the cross, all who believe in Christ receive His righteousness and also may enter God’s presence, he pointed out.

Akin said the students of a seminary community should reflect the work of Christ through personal holiness. Lying, cheating and plagiarizing are sins that should never be a problem on seminary campuses and yet they often are, Akin noted. Seminarians are also susceptible to ingratitude and arrogance, two temptations that must be avoided, Akin said, because they demonstrate neither clean hands nor a pure heart.

Finally, Akin said Psalm 24 speaks of the ascension of Christ into heaven. While some commentators suggest the passage refers to the return of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, Akin said he thinks the passage ultimately teaches about the entrance of Jesus, the victorious Messiah King, into heaven.

“This King of glory is a powerful and strong God. This King is a warrior who is strong and not weak,” he said. “This king is the Lord of hosts, the Lord of armies. This King is prepared to make His entrance back into heaven because He has fought the holy war on Calvary’s holy hill. There our holy King engaged the forces of evil, conquering death by death and by His glorious resurrection.”

God has created men and women different and married couples must value and celebrate their differences or risk rejecting God’s good design, Bob Lepine, co-host of a popular daily radio program told couples at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Monday night.

Men and women have differences that spring from their gender, their family backgrounds, their personalities and their life experiences, all of which God has pronounced to be good, said Lepine, co-host with Dennis Rainey of the FamilyLife Today radio program, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.

God ordained marriage such that couples complement and complete each other with their varying personalities, strengths and weaknesses, he said. Lepine was the keynote speaker for the annual Gheens Banquet at Southern Seminary.

“God is the one who has made us different as male and female,” Lepine said. “God is the one who brings us together with the idea that we will complete one another. God brings husband and wife for the completion, which means that in the plan of God, we all need help.

“God is the one who gave you different personalities and ordained your life experiences and your families of origin. He is the one who superintended you becoming who you are. And then He brings you together. So to try to deny gender differences or to try to deny that God brought you together is really a subtle rebellion against God and His plan.”

Many times spouses have different—and sometimes seemingly opposite—personalities, Lepine said. The husband within a given marriage may be more of an introvert and the wife an extrovert or the husband may be task-oriented, while his wife is relationship-driven; one may be optimistic and the other more realistic.

It is crucial to realize that neither personality trait is more “correct” than the other, Lepine pointed out, but all personalities are a part of God’s hard wiring of the individual person. Problems occur when one’s personality becomes influenced by indwelling sin to a point that its expression causes problems within the relationship, he said. Couples must walk in the Spirit of God and not merely blame their sinful proclivities on fixed personality traits, he said.

“When (Christians are walking by the Spirit), then the expression of our personality and our understanding of our mate’s personality is going to be guided by God’s gracious Spirit to help us appreciate and benefit from and grow in our understanding of one another,” he said. “Blaming your personality can also be an expression of sin. Your personality is not determinative.”

A second area of profound difference a couple brings into the marriage is family background, he said. Some spouses enter a marriage having grown up in a difficult or dysfunctional family, he pointed out, and God gives that person a helpmate to encourage them and help heal the scars.

“We are not held hostage to our past,” he said. “The apostle Paul had much he could look back on in regret and much he could commend. His response was what he said in Philippians 3 that he was forgetting what lay behind and looking forward to what lies ahead. A mature way of thinking is to say, ‘I’m not going to let the past define my life.’ God has given you a spouse to be a big part of that.”

Each spouse also brings to the marriage different life experiences, Lepine said. Some life experiences are positive and some are negative. For example, Lepine said one spouse may have more education than the other or one may have traveled more broadly or one may have been involved in sports or one may even have a past checkered by hard experiences such as promiscuity or abuse.

Spouses that have areas of regret from their past must put fully accept the forgiveness that is theirs in Christ, Lepine said.

The Gospel has been granted for forgiveness of sins and transformation and those who have been scarred by a regretful past must embrace both and realize that God is sovereignly controlling all the events of our lives in His all-wise plan.

God gave husbands and wives to each other as a means of grace so they can work to overcome issues related to the past, he said.

“God gave you each other so that you can unpack some of these suitcases together,” he said.

Finally, as man and woman joined in the covenant of marriage, spouses obviously bring gender differences into the marriage, he said. Lepine set forth three biblical truths that must govern gender differences:

· God designed men and women to be different, therefore the differences are good.

· By God’s design men and women are different, but equal in value.

· God uses gender differences within marriage to help both spouses grow.

“One key to your marriage is to understand and value your differences,” he said. “One person has said a great marriage is not when a perfect couple comes together, but when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences. Your goal is not to change your spouse. You need to seek first to understand your spouse and then to be understood. Don’t do it the other way around. Appreciating your mate’s different may sometimes mean you have to adjust your point of view.

“This really is a spiritual issue, because the fundamental issue really is will we embrace God’s design in creating us with these differences—your gender, your background, your family, your personality. He created you and then brought you together in covenant. Will you thank Him and praise Him for that? Will you accept it as a good and kind gift from a good and kind God or will you kick against the goad? Will you try to deny or to change what He is done? When we reject our spouse, we are fundamentally rejecting God and His perfect plan for our life.”

Many people think of the Easter season as the one time each year when they should gather to celebrate Jesus’ cross and resurrection.

But according to hymn writer Keith Getty, believers can celebrate the cross and resurrection each week of the year by singing hymns with lyrics that exalt the work of Christ.

“In the same way as when we preach to people, we’re teaching them the faith (with hymns),” Getty said Feb. 22 delivering the Institute for Christian Worship Lectures along with his wife Kristyn at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “We’re challenging them. We’re inspiring them and motivating them to go out and live for Christ.”

The Gettys, who are from Ireland, have written numerous modern hymns including the popular “In Christ Alone,” which Keith penned with Stuart Townend.

Getty told students that hymns play an important role in churches by putting truth in believers’ minds that can sustain them throughout the week. With the approaching Easter season, hymns will also have the opportunity to place truth in the minds of many non-believers who attend church with their families, he said.

“Easter is a wonderful opportunity to actually use these songs to bring the faith to them, to use these songs creatively,” he said. “What a challenge that is to choose good words and to make sure our congregation can sing the things well as a witness.”

In his own hymn writing Getty said he tries to put a sense of drama in the music that matches the excitement of deep biblical truths such as salvation in Christ and the resurrection.

“If you can create in the musical side of things plenty of drama in the song, a sense of direction and a sense of going somewhere and a sense of really celebrating, that actually cuts out a lot of the problems modern people have with hymns—because the songs actually go somewhere,” Getty said. “It creates all the effects that a modern chorus would have.”

There is a place in Christian worship for both praise choruses and hymns, he said, adding that it is wrong to consider choruses more contemporary and hymns a relic of the past.

“There’s been a strong criticism that what we’re doing is not contemporary,” he said of his hymn writing. “Obviously we believe it is. The syntax of the sentences is perfectly understandable to contemporary culture, and the melodies are very singable to contemporary culture. So to me that’s more important than whether it relates to modern radio culture or modern pop mantra lyric culture.”

Getty said he does not think his own songs will ever be the “diet of contemporary radio” because they’re not in the style of most pop music. But he does hope his songs will encourage an increasing number of Christians over the years.

“If the songs become more popular, then to whom much is given, much is expected. So you have more challenges. But I don’t really spend time stargazing, wondering what’s going to happen,” he said.

“We write the best songs we can write with the limited time and abilities we have. We try to introduce them to as many people as possible.”

Among Getty’s other hymns are “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” and “O What a Morning.”

For further information about the Gettys’ music and ministry, visit www.gettymusic.com.

As LifeWay Christian Resources examines its future it must maintain a proper perspective by considering itself a ministry first and a business second, LifeWay President Thom Rainer said Feb. 28 during a presentation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Reviewing the history of the Christian resource provider, Rainer noted that LifeWay has been self-supporting since its inception in 1891 as the Sunday School Board. Despite this legacy, which clearly has its advantages, Rainer said the Southern Baptist organization must always maintain a ministry focus.

“One of the dangers we have at LifeWay is that we are so focused on being a business that pays its own way, that we forget that our primary purpose is not revenue production, but it is to do ministry for the benefit of local churches, primarily in the Southern Baptist Convention,” he said.

“Because we are self-sustaining and self-supporting sometimes we act too much like a business. We are first a ministry and when we forget that, we have forgotten who we are, who we serve and who owns us.”

Rainer was on the campus of Southern Seminary to present his vision for the future of LifeWay. Before beginning as LifeWay president Feb. 1, 2006, Rainer served for 11 years as founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Church Growth at Southern.

In addition to the challenge of maintaining a ministry focus, Rainer identified several other issues the organization must address to effectively minister to local churches.

“One of the challenges is our sheer size, bureaucracy,” he said. “When you have an organization that has 3,000 full-time equivalent employees, and 7,000 total employees, there is a tendency to have an organization that is not nearly as streamlined as it could be. It is big, and sometimes it can be cumbersome. As a result, there are times when we respond like a bureaucracy, responding slowly or not responding at all.”

Another challenge Rainer noted is meeting the needs of the numerous and varied constituencies within the Southern Baptist Convention.

“I had no idea of the diversity of theological views, within orthodox theology, that makes up the Southern Baptist Convention,” he said.

“We have an academic constituency, such as this seminary. We have a constituency that thinks we cater too much to the academic constituency. It is a constant challenge to serve the Southern Baptist Convention, but that does not mean that we will not strive to do that.”

In presenting a vision for addressing these challenges, Rainer said LifeWay must achieve biblical depth in its materials.

“LifeWay employees have heard it from me again and again: we must pursue biblical depth,” he said.

“It is a challenge to present a Sunday School lesson [with biblical depth] that people will cover in 30-40 minutes, but we are going to do it. Recently, we created B&H Academic. B&H Academic is important to me, because it will influence the influencers. It will influence the pastors and lay leaders in the church. If we can have a small role in influencing the influencers then we will have made at least some contribution.”

Rainer said LifeWay would seek to present this biblical depth in a relevant way, which is one of the reasons he founded the LifeWay Research and Ministry Development department.

“There is often the assumption that to mention the word relevance means that you abandon biblical depth and a biblical framework,” he said. “I will say that this can occur and often does. But, we have to touch the generations of today. We have to reach out to those who have not been hearing our messages in our churches.

“We also want to attempt to listen to our churches better. We do not want to be the organization that decides we have a product we want to dump on the churches. Instead, we want to be the organization that listens to where churches are and tries to respond to churches needs.”

Finally, Rainer said LifeWay would be unapologetically evangelistic.

“I have a heart-burning desire to be an entity that reaches people for Jesus Christ,” he said. “It is my prayer that -- for the glory of God -- when the ministry of Thom Rainer is done evangelism is something I will be remembered for emphasizing at LifeWay.”

Amid a culture that worships celebrity and gauges every activity by the amount of fun involved, the church must stand out by pointing people to the need for conversion and a changed lifestyle, noted author Ken Myers said Feb. 28 during a Carl F.H. Henry Institute panel discussion at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Myers, executive producer and host of Mars Hill Audio and author of “All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes,” said the church should be clearly distinguishable from the worldly culture.

“My desire would be for such people to see the church as an institution that is a haven of integrity and order in the midst of a culture of disorder,” he said. “The church always needs to ask, ‘how can we make a point of contact with people who are disenchanted with the world?’ not ‘how can we make a contact with people who are enchanted with the world?’”

The panel discussion was part of the C. Edwin Gheens Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Institute for Christian Worship at Southern. Panel participants included Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr.; Russell D. Moore, senior vice president of academic administration and dean of the School of Theology; and Mark Coppenger, distinguished professor of Christian apologetics.

Moore, executive director of the Carl F.H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement, moderated the discussion. Moore asked Myers if the “celebrity culture” spoken of in Myers’ book has changed since its publication in 1989. Myers said the worship of celebrity status really began in the early 20th century with the rise of the motion picture and continues to intensify.

“The fact that movies were called ‘screen idols’ [when they were created] is no accident,” Myers said. “Movies allowed for the development of a projection of a persona apart from an actual person, particularly from a person’s character.

“What has changed in the last 20 to 40 years is that institutions that once served as mechanisms of restraint to this development have decided, ‘if you can’t beat them, join them.’ The church historically, has been one of those restraining institutions, teaching people to not get caught up in ‘celebrity-ism.’ It is a kind of idolatry and you ought to not get caught up in it. And yet, a lot of church leaders today mimic celebrities in order to gain a greater following.”

Another cultural trend the church must buck is the infatuation with having fun, Myers said. Daniel Bell’s book “Cultural Contradictions and Capitalism” identifies the cultural transition in the early 20th century from a morality centered on goodness to a morality focused on fun, Myers said.

“Bell notes that goodness morality was about interfering with impulses, [while fun morality is guided by impulses],” Myers said. “Not having fun becomes an occasion for self-examination: ‘what’s wrong with me, I‘m not having fun?’ That is a new question for people to ask.

“(Sigmund) Freud’s prescription for the loss of confidence in objective goodness was desires becoming the anchoring point for character. Instead of desires being seen as something that needs to be trained and often repudiated, desires become natural law. ‘Are we having fun yet?’ becomes the ultimate moral question.”

To counteract this approach to morality and to enable the church to be a moral change agent, Mohler said pastors must train their congregations to live with eternity in mind.

“We are the people who are supposed to believe that we don’t have total satisfaction in this world,” he said. “We have an eschatological faith. We stay married, we raise children, we do without, and I think we are often forgetting that and are buying into the cultural argument that we must be satisfied now.

“The apostle Paul gives us a good model in that he understood who he was, who the people group he was trying to reach was and how the culture was he was trying to reach. We are too much in love with the world, that is the bottom line.”

Myers said pastors must prioritize teaching on the nature of conversion.

“Pastors must impart to their congregations that conversion is a big thing. That conversion is not just adding a set of propositions about soteriology to your life, but challenging a lot of the assumptions and cultural forms that have been a part of your life,” he said. “The church does not present a hearty image of what conversion is. A lot of it is conveying that your whole life has to be changed and that means the things that have been sustaining the infrastructure of your old life are open to question.”

Mars Hill Audio is a nonprofit organization devoted to helping Christians think wisely about modern culture through a variety of audio resources, according to its website.

Myers previously served as executive editor of “Eternity,” a monthly evangelical magazine, and for eight years was a producer and editor for National Public Radio, working for much of that time as arts and humanities editor for the two news programs, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”

In the 21st century mainstream culture, spirituality has reached new heights of popularity.

However, much of what passes itself off for spirituality is nothing more than vacuous self-worship which stands in direct conflict with what Scripture demonstrates to be authentic, Christ-centered spirituality, essayists in the latest edition of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (SBJT) seek to demonstrate.

The latest SBJT examines the topic of Biblical Spirituality, and essayists sift through numerous issues raised by contemporary spirituality and set forth a genuine, God-honoring spirituality as taught in Scripture.

Contributors include four Southern Seminary professors—journal editor Stephen J. Wellum, Robert L. Plummer, Shawn D. Wright and Michael A.G. Haykin. Other essayists include noted author and Bible scholar Graeme Goldsworthy, author and minister Peter Adam and Phil Johnson, executive director of John MacArthur’s ministry, Grace to You.

In his editorial, Wellum establishes the problem: most spirituality in the secular culture is miles away from scriptural spirituality.

“Most of today’s discussion regarding ‘spirituality’ is so eclectic and syncretistic that it is imperative that Christians do not confuse contemporary discussions and forms of it with true biblical spirituality,” Wellum writes.

“As the old adage goes, ‘Ideas have consequences,’ and the ideas surrounding current thought on spirituality, if not grounded in a Christian worldview centered in the gospel, will the end, lead to spiritual disaster.”

Plummer seeks to answer whether or not the Bible enjoins the practices of silence and solitude that are popular among some current advocates of the Christian spiritual disciplines.

While silence and solitude can serve as aids to prayer and meditation on the Bible, Plummer concludes that they are not spiritual disciplines per-se. Plummer serves as assistant professor of New Testament interpretation.

“It seems to me that silence and solitude should not be thought of as spiritual disciplines in and of themselves,” Plummer writes.

“They are conditions that aid in the practice of spiritual disciplines such as prayer and biblical meditation. The danger of thinking of silence and solitude as disciplines in themselves could lead to a focus on the absence of noise or absence of other persons to the neglect of the actual biblical purpose for that absence.”

Wright, who serves as assistant professor of church history, provides an illustration of biblical spirituality in an essay on the piety of Reformation era theologian Theodore Beza. One foundational aspect of Beza’s spirituality was his undying trust in the sovereignty of God, Wright asserts.

While cultural circumstances have changed since the days of Beza, spiritual and eternal realities have not, Wright points out. Thus, Beza is a commendable model of the Bible put into practice, he writes.

“(N)othing of real importance has changed,” he writes. “Heaven and hell remain the eternal locations to which every person is going, one an existence of eternal joy, the other a place of eternal torment. Satan is still raging against God, God’s truth, and God’s people.

“The Bible remains God’s inerrant word, a trustworthy guide in every facet of our earthly pilgrimage. Believers still struggle to fight the fight of faith, to live in the world without being part of it, to have our hope fixed on heaven instead of the world around us. The outward trappings may be different, but the eternal realities are constant. Most significantly for us, our God still reigns sovereignly over us, over all our concerns, and over every aspect of the universe.

“Beza, and the Bible, urge and challenge us to put our hope in our Sovereign Father as we seek to honor him with our lives.”

Similarly, Haykin’s essay commends the godliness of English Baptists in the 17th and 18th centuries. Haykin serves as visiting professor of church history and is principal of Toronto Baptist Seminary in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Baptists are the children of Puritanism and the family connection between the two is seen clearly in the godly lives of the 17th and 18th century Baptists, Haykin writes. He introduces readers to key Baptist figures of that era such as John Sutcliff and Benjamin Keach.

“Just as the Puritans were primarily men and women intensely passionate about piety and Christian experience, so spirituality lies at the very core of the English Baptist movement during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” he writes.

“For example, Baptists in this era were adamant that keeping in step with the Spirit was the vital matter when it came to the nourishment of the soul of the believer or the sustenance of the inner life of the congregation.”

The journal also includes the SBJT Forum in which scholars such as D.A. Carson, Mark Coppenger, Joel R. Beeke and Pierre Constant consider particular questions on Christian spirituality. A number of book reviews are also included.

To obtain a copy of the SBJT or to subscribe, please contact the journal office at journaloffice@sbts.edu.