The Lord bless you and keep you on this fine day.

“Self-control is a Fruit of the Spirit, which means that we depend upon God’s grace to receive it, but we can’t be passive. Self-control is a discipline, too. It is a muscle we exercise or we don’t. We each have an obligation to mortify our flesh and resist sinful temptation in all forms. Given the powerful currents of our society, we must be intentional about practicing self-denial.”

Betty-Anne Van Rees points out that when we are afraid we are often afraid of the wrong thing. “One mystifying aspect of the spiritual battles we face as followers of Jesus is the almost universal tendency to be afraid of the things that are helpful for us and unafraid of those that are harmful.”

Selah means pause. Reflect. Meditate. Consider. Take a breath. See God for who he is. Can you feel the weight lifted from David’s shoulders? Do you feel your own heartbeat slowing down at this beautiful change in his perspective? Yes, Saul was still pursuing him, and he and his men would need to move camp again. But they could handle these things with the confidence of faith in their God. (Sponsored)

Doug will help reaffirm in your mind just how dumb it is to sin.

This article is a celebration of sorts—a celebration of the various kid noises you tend to hear on a Sunday morning.

“Unbelievers, even though their hearts and minds are opposed to God’s truth, sometimes have more spiritual insight than we give them credit for.” Let Robert Rothwell explain what he means and why it matters.

We know the death of a saint is precious in the eyes of the Lord. But do we know why? Jim McCarthy offers three good reasons.

Of all the mysteries in this universe, few are more perplexing than the mystery of God’s sovereignty over life and death…Why does God call some early to heaven who surely could have done so much good on earth? Why God, we ask? Why?

God’s eternal, heavenly story doesn’t obliterate my earthly, painful story; it gives it meaning.
—Robert Kellemen

Good morning. Grace and peace to you.
Today’s Kindle deals include Paul Tripp’s Sunday Matters and David Mathis’ Habits of Grace—both excellent books.
(Yesterday on the blog: The Glorious End without the Difficult Means)

George Sinclair looks at an important biblical command and considers how it can apply to good fathers and bad fathers alike.

Also on the subject of dads, Greg Lucas tells about a time he was tempted to give up. “My tiny world as a father was about to grow much bigger than I could have ever imagined, and much deeper than I could have ever dreamed. Like a skilled surgeon, God slowly and mercifully cut away all my superficial expectations of earthly fatherhood and replaced them with images of an eternal heavenly Father. Those self-encouraging words ‘Don’t give up dad’ were replaced by His divine promise of, ‘I will never give you up.’”

Alan Shlemon: “June is when many companies celebrate ‘Pride Month.’ I’m often asked how I respond to stores that celebrate and/or promote homosexuality and transgenderism. Since I routinely navigate these situations, I’m happy to share my approach. Here’s what I do.”

Scott Klusendorf describes 5 myths about the pro-life movement.

Brad Hambrick is offering a free seminary that may appeal to those who have heard about the recent discussions/disagreements in the world of Christian counseling and are wondering what they are all about. “It is for the person who is confused or discouraged by why recent debates and controversies emerged; It is for the person who wants to understand the context for recent debates and controversies; It is for the person who got excited about utilizing the Bible to help and care for people in the church and now feel forced unnecessarily to ‘pick a team.’”

Andy Naselli answers a very common question about election.

When Jesus tells how to restore relationships, he has laid a table of tenderness. He has established a context of gentleness. 

“A sermon is not over when the minister says “Amen” Rather that is when the true sermon begins.”
—Joel Beeke

We all love to be part of a movement, don’t we? There is a kind of exhilaration that comes with being part of something that has energy and excitement. There is a kind of spiritual thrill that comes with being part of something that is premised upon sound doctrine and fixated on the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what compelled so many to associate themselves with what was varyingly labeled “New Calvinism,” “Young, Restless, Reformed,” or the “Gospel-Centered Movement.”

Lest We Drift

It is a bit strange, only twenty years after it all began, to read what is already a kind of post-mortem of the movement. Yet that is a part of what Jared Wilson offers in his new book Lest We Drift: Five Departure Dangers from the One True Gospel. In its pages he asks: What went wrong with this movement? How did it gain such momentum, then lose it again? What mistakes were made and how can we avoid them in the future?

Let me pause for a moment to address the matter of nomenclature. I have never been a fan of the term “gospel-centered.” I generally eschew it because I find it novel (new to the Christian lexicon) and abstract (difficult to understand and apply). Nevertheless, it is the term Wilson uses for the movement and he defines it this way: “Gospel-centrality as a concept is essentially a summation of historic Reformed theology and Protestant spirituality that adherents would argue are as old as the Bible. … in its paradigmatic sense, gospel-centrality is shorthand for a Reformed understanding of biblical spirituality, bringing with it distinct truth claims that give the ideology substantial implications for life and ministry.” At some point, a movement based on Reformed theology was challenged to become a movement based on gospel-centrality. In my estimation, it never quite took and never quite worked. But let’s press on.

Wilson begins with a short biography of himself that could easily be the biography of so many people who had come to faith in seeker-friendly churches but then began to long for something more—a faith that had more content and more substance. Through the new technology of the internet, they encountered John Piper, R.C. Sproul, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, or some of the other prominent preachers or teachers. Before long they had embraced Reformed theology and, in many cases, the idea of gospel-centeredness. But that was then and this is now.

More and more leaders my age who once seemed so committed to the ministry philosophy of gospel-centrality now seem to have moved on. And they haven’t all migrated to the same place. The balkanization of the young, restless, and Reformed tribe has resulted in silos and splinters, some more substantial than others. They run the gamut from social gospel–style progressivism and Christian “wokeness” to right-wing political syncretism and legalistic fundamentalism. Even among the numbers who still hold to the doctrinal claims of Reformed theology and its implications for gospel ministry, there are now a number of factions and divisions along political and cultural lines. I thought we were “together for the gospel.”

Didn’t we all, at least for a time? Wilson’s particular concern is the idea and doctrine he has championed and defended for all this time: gospel-centrality.

Gospel-centrality really is God’s way for the Christian life and church. Gospel-centrality really is biblical. But part of doggedly committing to the centrality of Christ’s finished work in all things is being sober-minded—aware of our own inclinations to add to, subtract from, or otherwise attempt to enhance or augment the powerful work of the Holy Spirit through the message of grace in Christ. It’s not enough to be aware of how Mark Driscoll and others drifted. It’s our own drift that calls for our attention.

This drift is the concern at the heart of his book. Understanding what happened is the theme of the first couple of chapters and understanding the consequences is the theme of the next five.

So what happened?

For this particular armchair coroner, the primary cause of death was that the influencers and authorities of gospel-centrality failed to rise to the occasion of quickly changing cultural challenges and threats to theological orthodoxy. The movement’s thought leaders were assimilated into the pacifying (and compromising) swamps of “Big Eva” and thus lost their reformational fire—and their reformational credibility.

If you were along for the ride, you’ll appreciate his history of the movement’s rise and fall, and perhaps sometimes cringe as you remember some of its defining moments.

But more important than this is his warning about five different kinds of drift, which are not drifts from a movement but drifts from the gospel. Hence, whether or not you are “gospel-centered,” you will benefit from reading and considering them.

He begins with a drift into victimhood and explains that if we root our identity in anything other than Christ, we effectively place ourselves at the center and can soon become convinced we are victims of society or circumstances. “The cross does not secure your body from victimization,” he says. “But it does secure your identity from victimhood.” He then discusses the all-too-common drift into dryness in which Christ no longer thrills our souls and we go casting about for different kinds of delight. This will always lead to spiritual dryness and drift. “Religiosity cannot ultimately keep us from apostasy. If anything, it might expedite it, as we find it harder and harder to keep up the religious efforts without a renewed heart. The machinery of ‘spirituality’ cannot move for long without the oil of spiritual vitality. And this spiritual vitality can come only from friendship with Jesus.”

Wilson warns as well about the kind of superficiality that weds Christianity to a consumerist culture and the kind of pragmatism that replaces trust in Scripture with confidence in whatever methods appear to be effective. A chapter that may take some by surprise in a movement characterized by its commitment to the gospel is one about the temptation of legalism, for “the leaven of legalism is subtler than we realize.” We may think our focus on the gospel inoculates us against legalism, but legalism can take on new and deceptive forms. “We see the new legalism at work in evangelicalism today when we conflate secondary and even tertiary doctrines with primary ones. We see it at work when we prioritize cultural conformity over gospel unity and insist on extrabiblical litmus tests for orthodoxy that are more in line with tribal affiliations than with Christian communion.” A concluding chapter pleads with Christians to be aware of the tendency and temptation to drift—to leave behind the gospel and center the Christian life and the Christian church on anything else, anything less.

I have read most of Wilson’s books over the years and appreciate this one as much as any of them. His telling of history is both interesting and illuminating (though I think there could have been more said about the role of women in popularizing the movement such as writers like Gloria Furman, Emily Jensen, and Laura Wifler who rose with the movement and carried it to their demographic of young moms). Of more importance is his focused and timely warnings about both the tendency to drift and the specific ways in which each of us is prone to drift. No matter what movement we are part of or what label we prefer to wear, as long as we are “Christian,” these chapters are pure gold.