Jonathan Martin’s Prototype: Salvation as the Restoration of Humanity

It’s a strange and beautiful thing to hear someone preaching your own thoughts in a sermon. That’s what happened for me last summer when I heard Pentecostal preacher Jonathan Martin‘s sermon series “The Songs of Ascent” about King David and the Psalms. My whole life, I have been on a journey of trying to understand the nature of worship. Growing up Baptist, I was instilled with a zeal for sincerity in worship. What is the difference between truly worshiping God and putting on a performance? In one sermon last summer, Jonathan said that King David’s worship was to delight in the discovery of God’s delight in him. This beautiful way of framing things is at the heart of Jonathan’s new book Prototype, which I would buy and ship to every Christian who has been wounded or disillusioned by the church if I had the money.

752 and the messianic longing of Scandal

Since my wife is addicted to Scandal, I watched it with her last night while I was reading the last few chapters of my friend Jonathan Martin’s newly released book Prototype, in which he argues that Jesus is the prototype of authentic humanity. The juxtaposition of Jonathan’s beautiful words on the page and the profound human brokenness on the screen was overwhelming. Throughout the Scandal episode, a character named Huck who has been severely traumatized by incredible wickedness is in a trance uttering the number 752 over and over again. Wrapped up in the mystery of that number is the basic pathos of the human condition that I believe the Christian gospel addresses, especially in the way that my brother Jonathan presents it in his book.

How does a Wesleyan deal with predestination and election?

My favorite preacher Jonathan Martin covered Romans 8 a couple of weekends ago in his sermon “Nor Things to Come.” It talks about both predestination and election, which are not popular words in the Wesleyan tradition that I share with Jonathan. I really liked what he did with them so I wanted to share very briefly. I think that our predestination and election are good news when we read them the way they are intended to be shared: as a promise. It’s when you add a bunch of extra-Biblical speculation about the negative shadow of predestination and election that the mischief happens.

Why you need to hear Jonathan Martin preach about heaven

I’ve got issues with how people talk about heaven. It bothers me that the most popular Christian books are “proofs” of the afterlife instead of accounts of how people have lived out the kingdom of God here on Earth. Last week, part of my sermon text came from a passage in Hebrews 11 that refers to the hope of the Israelite patriarchs: “All of these died in faith without having received the promises… They desired a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.” It is one thing to live in the hope of a promise that will not be fulfilled in your lifetime; it is another thing to live in a nihilistic indifference to God’s beautiful creation because you’re ready for Him to burn it up and rapture you away. The way that my favorite podcast preacher Jonathan Martin put it in his sermon last week is that we don’t need to get ready to leave Earth and go to heaven; we need to be ready for the day that God brings heaven to Earth.

Is Jesus saving the world from us?

Is Jesus saving the world from us? It’s a different way to talk about salvation, but honestly it’s the gospel that I’m hoping to be true as an evangelical afflicted by what Rachel Held Evans calls “the scandal of the evangelical heart.” When did we become the Pharisees Jesus came to Earth to stop us from being? How many of us have been secretly asking that question in our minds? How many of us need to be saved from a toxic salvation? I really feel that we are in the midst of a great awakening. The legion of demons that poisoned our gospel for so long is running off a cliff in a herd of hateful pigs, leaving us to wake up in the graveyard where we chained ourselves. We are discovering that Satan is our accuser and oppressor, not God.  We are realizing that our need to be right and justify ourselves has kept us inside a tomb whose stone was rolled away by Jesus. So I wanted to share five things God has been teaching me over the past few years about what Jesus saves us from and what He saves us for.

Danceable Homiletics #2: “Don’t Stand Up For Jesus” (featuring Jonathan Martin)

All right here’s the second one. I just kind of got in the zone tonight. This is from Jonathan Martin’s sermon “Don’t Stand Up For Jesus” which he preached at the height of the Chik-Fil-A drama last summer. Jonathan’s point is that we should stand with Jesus as He stands up for sinners against the people who want to stone them. So here it is:

Looking back on 2012: June-July

In June and July, I wrote about my family reunion, the culture wars, a whole lot in Ephesians including a sermon in which I talk about sin as a zombie apocalypse, and the little noticed moral pragmatism that Paul seems to exhibit in Romans 14-15. So here are ten posts from those two months.

A Call to Humility and Repentance

My buddy Derek wrote a post yesterday about how it’s not inappopriate for Christians to either mourn or celebrate in response to a presidential election. I agree with what Derek had to say; it was a legitimate reminder to be gracious in responding to the emotions of our friends. I do also think that all Christians regardless of our political views need to be called to humility and repentance. We have just been through a very acrimonious campaign season in which we have all sinned by saying hurtful and unfair things about blanket categories of people who are either “immoral and lazy” or “greedy and dishonest.” It is now time to examine ourselves and ask God to heal us from the spiritual damage of our sin. Most of my thoughts here are inspired by a recent sermon “Gratuitous Grace, Unfair Grace” from my favorite preacher Jonathan Martin of Renovatus Church in Charlotte, NC, which you should listen to on his podcast.

Chuck DeGroat on “Men Without Fear”

One of the most obnoxious things for me about contemporary evangelicalism has been the neo-masculinist movement of Mark Driscoll, John Piper, and others like them. I think it brings up a lot of things from my past. The reason I sought out a savior in the first place was because I was the opposite of macho. I have always resonated deeply to the vulnerability Paul expressed to the Corinthians: “I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling” (1 Cor 2:3). What drove me out of the fellowship groups I joined in college was the way that all the people around me seemed so beautiful and confident. Their perfectly straight white teeth were like gates that barred me from seeing much of anything beneath the surface. I feel like today’s megachurchianity in its ethos of making Jesus attractive and contagious produces a particular vision of Christian manliness as “unflappable, decisive leadership.” If that’s what being a man is, I fail utterly. I have absolute confidence in God’s ability to work through me and show me how to help others find God’s vision for them, but zero confidence in my own ability to puff out my chest and show everyone else that I’m in charge. That’s why I’m always delighted to find teaching like San Francisco pastor Chuck DeGroat’s recent piece challenging men to lose the fear… of their vulnerability.

Are we an interest group or a kingdom of disciples and evangelists?

I get that we live in a morally complex world, but I want us to do better. The Chick-Fil-A drama has been a series of disappointments for me on all sides. I’m disappointed at progressives for uncritically circulating misinformation about what Chick-Fil-A’s Don and Dan Cathy actually said and who their foundation actually supports (only several thousand of the alleged $3 million in donations can truly be said to go to “anti-gay” activist groups). I’m disappointed at the mayors of Boston and Chicago for inappropriately responding to something that shouldn’t have merited their attention in a clumsy gesture to a segment of their donor base that turned this into a “free speech” issue for culture warriors to rally around. I’m disappointed at my fellow evangelical Christians for letting themselves get baited into reinforcing the stereotype that all Christians care about is policing the sexuality of other people. I’ve already spoken to several other aspects of this issue. Here’s the question I want to ask my fellow Christians: are we an interest group or a kingdom of disciples and evangelists?