City Life Starter

Following the end of our Luke series, the church had a chance for people to ask questions and have them answered on stage during a panel discussion. Most of the questions were not answered, but have been posted here on this devotional blog. Though, several of the original questions will not be addressed twice. Please watch the YouTube video below if you wish to hear these answers. The panel discussion starts at minute 40.

Evangelism, Outreach, and Daily Struggles

Thinking about the Engage Year in City Life: How do you make the Gospel mean something to someone who doesn’t have any sort of belief in God or even in the concept of sin?

Answer by Scott Fiddler

The key here is recognizing that everyone has a concept of sin because everyone is a sinner, and everyone who sins feels guilty. Christianity has the best explanation for why people feel guilty–they are guilty. When you speak to people’s guilt you are speaking to their heart.

Answer by Stefan Johnsson

Sometimes you just need to define to someone what sin is. Dr. James Tour, in many of his YouTube videos, talks about his own path to salvation. He thought he was a good person, but he was addicted to pornography. It didn’t take more than a person quoting to him the passage of adultery from the Sermon on the Mount where even looking at a woman lustfully is sin against a holy God (Matthew 5:27-30). That shook him to his core and eventually it led him on the path to salvation. Sin is a word often used by Christians, but many people do not know or understand the meaning, but as Scott said above, they would know what guilt is. Connecting guilt to sin would be a great starting point and don’t be afraid to use passages from the Bible to explain this.

How do you begin to share the Gospel with someone who does not feel guilt, thinks their life is already great as it is, and does not care about the afterlife?

Answer by Stefan Johnsson

The best you can do is pray for them, show them Christ’s love, but do not let it overwhelm you when nothing happens. Sometimes you just need to wait and pray for God to open the door. It is when they hit a point in their life where everything falls apart, and they will come to seek after you because what you have will seem desirable to them. In Psalm 34:18, God says He’s close to the brokenhearted and rescues those whose spirits are crushed. And it is important that you take that time to share the gospel message with them and don’t just use the church to do so. We are all called to evangelize. Also, keep in mind that there is a reason why it is the poor and desolate who are open to God’s love more so than others. It’s the ones who Jesus mostly preached to, those who were oppressed by the Romans and the wealthy land owners. Jesus said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). It is those that we should care for and reach out to as a priority (that’s my personal opinion on this). 

Also, as we are in Luke, I will use the passage in 18:25, in that it is more difficult for a camel to enter through the eye of the needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. And why did Jesus say this? Because in verse 18, there was a rich young ruler who wanted to follow God, but he idolized his material possessions more than God in his heart. As Megan Meier so brilliantly put it in her devotional piece on this, for a camel to enter through the gate(eye of the needle), it has to take off everything and get down on its knees to walk through. It’s painful and difficult to humble yourself and give up everything, but with God, anything is possible.

Who are the modern “tax collectors and sinners” we are failing to invite to the table, like Jesus did in Luke by disrupting religious norms?

Answer by Stefan Johnsson

I would say this is simply anyone who is treated as lowly in our society. These include impoverished communities and people who are considered outcasts. As we are representatives in our communities, it should be important to focus also on where God has placed us. You have your neighborhood, work place, and family to witness to. The church, as a whole, focuses on the greater community ministries such as poor neighborhoods, homeless, or those caught in sex trafficking (here’s a good plug to take part in City Life’s ministry opportunities).

If you are having problems trying to choose who you should be reaching out to, I would suggest having a conversation with an elder in the church. Also, begin praying for God to give you a heart to reach a certain population of people and be ready to witness to whomever God has placed in your path. You will be surprised when you are open to the Holy Spirit’s guidance in your life.

I experienced unfair treatment at work that derailed my job progress for a year. I keep praying for God to avenge me. Is this the same as cursing a person?

Answer by Scott Fiddler

Joseph experienced unfair treatment at work multiple times. He was falsely accused of sexual harassment, wrongfully terminated, and wrongfully incarcerated (Gen. 39:7-20). In his job overseeing prisoners, Joseph was forgotten by the chief cupbearer after correctly interpreting his dream (Gen. 40:1-23). Joseph was forgotten and overlooked for two years (Gen. 41:1). What elevated Joseph in spite of all the injustice was his competence (Gen. 39:2-4, 22-23, 41:39-40) and divine favor (39:4, 21, 41:39). Divine favor is God’s favorable disposition toward us and his causing others to be favorably disposed toward us. 

Imprecatory prayers have their place–I’ve prayed a few myself–but striving to be the best you can be at your job and praying for favor is usually more effective in advancing your career and the kingdom of God.

Answer by Stefan Johnsson

Recently, I experienced a similar situation. Last summer, I was effectively denied a promotion to a position that I met the qualifications for. I had recommendations from both my prior directors, top directors from other institutions in the Houston area, and work colleagues who could vouch for my knowledge and expertise. I also had control of the office for seven months, dealing with multiple crises, showing my effectiveness and ability to lead. What did I get for that? A replacement by someone who came from outside the company. It was devastating to say the least, and left me with no upward mobility and a stagnation in my current role. Was it easy to go into work and look my prior supervisor in the eyes, knowing he didn’t believe in me? Of course not. But do I seek revenge? No, because leading is difficult and it is my job to honor those who I work for, no matter if I personally like them or not. What if, next time it’s me who takes away a position from someone who thought they deserved it more?

I know, in my heart, that God will give me what I need and prepare me for what He has next – something greater and better. When one door closes, another opens. Leave revenge to God, and don’t pray for it. Instead Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:44 to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. So to answer your question, praying for God to avenge you would be the wrong type of prayer.

What does the cost of following Jesus look like in modern times? Is it not free to follow Jesus when he paid the price?

Answer by Efe Abbe

The Lord Jesus said that no one could be His disciple without first counting the cost of following Him (Luke 14:25-33). Yes, Jesus paid the price for our salvation from sin (i.e. to release us from the bondage of sin and its consequence – death) and He saved us to new life in Him (John 1:12-13, 17:2-3). Because we are born into a reality that isn’t neutral, i.e. we are either for God or against Him (Matthew 12:30), following Jesus means, we will meet resistance. That resistance runs the spectrum from pressure from our culture to give in to sin, to persecution for following Jesus, or even death, but look at how much we have gained! Those of us who follow Jesus, gain Him! We gain true freedom in Him to come to God in His righteousness. So, yes, Jesus paid the price for us to have a new life in Himself, and the price He paid and this life He gives us are worth laying down everything for.

In what ways can we cultivate a spirit of joy during hard seasons, when the circumstances have your back against the wall and you’re barely holding on?

Answer by Efe Abbe

First, draw near to God and He will draw near to you (James 4:8), because He sees, hears, knows deeply and cares about what you are experiencing. He is for you and is the source of all that is good, including joy; being with Him in prayer and His word is nourishment for our souls. Next, lean into community (small groups, micro groups, young adult/women’s/men’s ministry, etc.), because we have been instructed to carry each other’s burdens (Galatians 6:2) – as we were not created to navigate life alone.

Answer by Nate Warren

Joy, the pervasive sense of wellbeing, is not the result of our circumstances. Rather, we sense our wellbeing in the reality of the life we have in Messiah Jesus. This is the natural outcome of the experience of knowing God, as really knowing Him reduces everything else to insignificance. This personal knowing of God is brought about by the Holy Spirit as we faithfully participate in the relationship. That’s why joy is a fruit of the Spirit.  

Trials are by nature difficult, but they are also a means of God’s power working in our lives. Some trials are opportunities for God’s power to be demonstrated to the world around us (Luke 5:17-26, Luke 7:11-17, Luke 13:10-17, Luke 17:11-19). Others are opportunities for us to detach from our worldly entanglements and increase our faith. (Luke 8:22-25, Luke 12:22-31, Luke 18:18-25, Luke 22:31-32). We must remember that the prize is not safety, privilege, comfort, or escape – it’s God Himself.

If you are struggling in the midst of a trial, ask God to show you how He feels about your suffering, and to reveal His love and care for you in the midst of it. 

What are some signs from God about your purpose in life?

Answer by Scott Fiddler

This is an important issue. Like Jesus, we all should want to say to the Father at the end of our earthly lives, “I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do.” (John 17:4). That starts with knowing what God has given us to do.

The life of Moses is a great place to find guidance for discovering your calling. Because we know from the burning bush that Moses was called to be a leader and deliverer of his people, we can look back at Moses’s life before the burning bush to see what clues he was provided as to his calling. I can think of at least four. 1. What God puts in your heart. Stephen tells us that when, as a younger man, Moses killed the Egyptian to save a fellow Israelite. Moses thought his people would understand that God was granting them deliverance through him (Acts 7:25). In other words, Moses’s calling was present in his heart before it was time for him to step into that calling. 2. What God gifts you to do. Moses was a natural leader. He was a man of action. He intervened to save a fellow Israelite and then to save his future wife and sisters-in-law (Exodus 2:16-21). 3. What God prepares you to do. God is practical. Moses was raised and educated in Pharoah’s court. He knew the court rules, Egyptian culture, and the language. Who better to send back to Egypt to deliver Israel? 4. What God tells you to do. And of course, there is the burning bush. A better way to think of this is as a confirmation of what God has already put in your heart and prepared you to do. That was the sequence in Moses’s life–the burning bush came last, after the other three signposts.

Great men & women throughout Luke that are marked by repentance towards God and service towards others (ie the poor). Why do a lot of churches value charisma?

Answer by Nate Warren

I’m going to assume that the questioner is referring to charisma as “demonstrating worldly attractiveness.” There is another kind of charisma that the Church should (and does) demonstrate – the gifts of the Spirit – but I will scope that out for my response.

If we believe what is written in the Bible, we should not be surprised that those who bear worldly fruit are in the Church, that political and doctrinal factions form, and that practitioners of worldly power gain influence. Jesus teaches that the harvest of grain must grow along with the weeds (Matt 13), and that many who prophesy and do miracles in His Name are not known by Him (Luke 13:25–27, Matthew 7:22–23). In Acts, the Church was divided over whether gentiles needed to convert to Judaism and conform to the laws of Torah, with passionate advocates of both positions, including Paul and Peter. (They reconciled this division by unifying on a common position by the leading of the Spirit. Acts 15) The New Testament epistles are full of examples of church communities engaging in sinful and heretical practices, with the writers exhorting them to repent.

In the book of Revelation, Jesus warned a church community that if they failed to repent and go in the right direction that he would “remove their lampstand from its place,” meaning they would no longer be in His presence. They would cease to be the Church. Those communities of the Church (perhaps we should consider congregations, denominations, doctrinal factions, etc.) that do not conform to the will of Jesus will be cut off from His presence and lose their place. 

We know that the Church is the spotless bride of Jesus, whom he died for and washed clean by His blood. God’s faithful must fight to stay close to the heart of God, exhorting one another to good. We should pray for our church leaders, that they will be blameless and steward well the flock they have been assigned, supporting them as they stand against demonic and satanic pressures to adopt worldly values.

Answer by Stefan Johnsson

If you are like me, you may watch podcasts on the commute to and from work. One podcaster that I’ve come to respect is “Mike Winger.” He has spent the last year going through what he calls, “Cover-Up Culture” in the church. This has especially been an issue in the charismatic movement. People are drawn to those who look as if they have more knowledge of God and the illusion of strong prophetic gifts, and churches become filled with people who want to see and experience this person more than seeing and experiencing God for themselves. Mike Winger showed an interview where a certain charismatic leader said that almost three-fourths of prophecies were faked. It is a staggering amount and it ruins what is a spiritual gift that God has given the church and where most people end up not trusting in it at all. Even fake prophets like Shawn Bolz would data mine social media such as Facebook and Instagram to get information about individuals so they would believe the prophecies he had. A lot of these sinful behaviors by “leaders” in the Church is due to people being lovers of themselves rather than lovers of God. Their image is more important than God’s glory. 

City Life Houston is defined as a charismatic church, but we do not prop up one person in the church over another. Our calling is the same, which is to glorify God through our works, so that people will see and believe in Jesus, not in an individual pastor. It’s not C.S. Pate Ministries, it’s City Life. It may have cost us some members to have different preachers each week, but I’d rather be true to the Bible than using the number of members as a justification to how much we are “blessed” by God. This would be erroneous. I may be straying some from your question, so let me bring it back into focus. Valuing charisma as a leadership skill is a problem, but it’s human nature to follow these types of people. That’s why we need to have a high level of discernment as Christians when choosing a church. I would suggest meditating on 1 Corinthians 1:10-17 which helps to show how people will choose one person to follow over another when all we should be doing is pointing people to Jesus.

Apologetics

Did Luke write the accounts while Jesus was alive? Was it after his death? If it’s the latter, how did he remember the exact stories, exact words of Jesus, etc.?

Answer by Stefan Johnsson

Before we started the Luke series, I spent my time reading the book, “Luke the Historian, In the Light of Research” by A.T. Robertson. He expands on how Luke was one of the greatest historians of his time and also how he used the techniques that were common in the 1st century A.D. This gives us a lot to work off of when dating the gospel. There are some questions about when or where Luke became a Christian. Was it during his missionary journeys with Paul or prior to this in the city of Antioch? There is a consensus though, that at some point, Luke became the primary care physician to Paul who was suffering from a “thorn in the flesh.” 

Luke wrote his gospel sometime in the range of A.D. 60-64 with Acts completed shortly after. One of the reasons for why it is believed to be written before 70 A.D. is because that’s when the temple destruction by the Romans happened and Luke never mentions this in Acts. Also, it is in Acts 16:10 that Luke begins to switch from describing Paul’s journeys and the history of the church in a narrative sense to a first-person plural. You see “we” for the first time in this verse. 

Now as far as how Luke got the prior information about Jesus’ life, it is believed that he spent some years in Caesarea Philippi and went around the area and interviewed witnesses, including Mary, the mother of Jesus. This is how he could accurately record the information about Jesus’ life. It is also believed he was able to use the Gospel of Mark as reference material.

How does it make sense to use the Bible to prove the Bible (particularly when talking about the 500 witnesses written about in 1 Corinthians 15)? 

Answer by Efe Abbe

It may help to reflect on the fact that the Bible is a library of books (66 total) and not just one book. We believe the Bible was written by human authors who were inspired by God. While each book’s author wrote to convey a specific message to their audience, we believe at the same time that God is the divine author of all the books that make up the Bible. A helpful illustration might be, when a significant current event takes place, multiple news outlets cover that same event but don’t all use the exact words or cover the same details,  yet we call their collective coverage “the news” or “the media” and while each outlet’s coverage is different in emphasis, we can use one outlet to corroborate another. It’s the same with the Bible where one author/book can provide depth or clarification, or even a different angle on the same event that was briefly mentioned by another author/book, all divinely inspired by God.

Answer by Nate Warren

There are plenty of historical and anecdotal evidence in the veracity of various facts in scripture, but we also trust the Bible because it leads us to Jesus, and He has proven Himself to us. The more we read and understand the Bible, the more we know Him. The more we engage with Him in our daily lives, the better we understand the Bible. I encourage you to engage it, at minimum, as a beautiful work of literature. You might be surprised to find in this story something more true that you’ve yet encountered.

Answer by Stefan Johnsson

First and foremost, the Bible is a historical book. Especially if you look at how Luke, as a historian, wrote down everything to make a historical account of what happened in his two books. 

Dr. Nelson Glueck stated: “It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference. Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical description has often led to amazing discoveries.”

Before the books of the Bible were canonized in the 4th century, each book or letter was separate and copied individually. Of course, Matthew did use the Gospel of Mark as a reference and Luke may have used both or just Mark, but the works are still unique and different, each one bringing a different point of view. So if you had all four gospels handed to you from different people, each with different authors, and each giving an interpretation of the events of Jesus’ life from their point of view, would they not be each individually considered as separate evidence for the events which transpired? Just because these books are now combined into what we call “The Bible,” it does not mean they are all now considered as just “one” full piece of evidence that cannot be used to corroborate itself. Historians, (even atheists would admit grudgingly) that any book in the Bible can definitely be used to verify what was written in another book of the Bible. I would recommend listening to any YouTube videos by Wesley Huff, who can explain how biblical texts are verified and corroborated.

It was Jesus’s physical body who died and then resurrected, but our physical bodies are staying here when we die; is Jesus’s physical body in heaven?

Answer by Paul Lane

It’s probably a mistake to assume that heaven follows the physical laws of our world one for one.  In John 8:58, Jesus says, “before Abraham was, I am.”  What Jesus is doing here is claiming to not be bound by the time and space constraints that we are bound to in our current state.  You can see this disposition in Jesus’ miracles when He walks on the water, performs healings, walks through walls, and ultimately when He is raised from the dead.

In 1 Corinthians 15:54-56, Paul makes the point that at the resurrection, we will get new bodies.  So, our mode of living will be changed from being in bodies that will die and fall apart, to bodies that will last forever.

Perhaps Luke 23:43 answers the question most directly.  Jesus tells the thief on the cross that “today” he will be with Him in paradise.  I believe that this is a statement that is not constrained by our understanding and perception of time and space.  There is an existence that is outside of what we can taste, touch, and feel.  As Shakespeare wrote, “there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamt of in our philosophy.”