For the next two weeks I have the joy of creating a memory-making blast while on vacation with my family in Tennessee. I expect the blog to be silent for at least that long.

On July 25 and August 1 I’ll have the privilege to teach at Cornerstone Church of Knoxville. I’ll resume blogging after I return from the family vacation.

I am humbled that you read this blog and hope in some small way it serves you.

Eschatology is not optional. In fact, our theology is incomplete without an understanding of the “last things.” In Jeff Purswell’s message at Next 2010, he explained it this way:

Eschatology is not intended to be an add-on to your theology. In many ways eschatology is the crown of theology. It answers questions that other doctrines raise.

And so we believe in God’s good providence. Where is God’s providence leading? We know Jesus paid for our sin, and he’s helping us battle that sin. But how will sin finally be overcome? We know that Jesus triumphed on the cross. What will it look like when he finally triumphs over all things? How will the Holy Spirit finish his work in us? What will the church ultimately look like?

Eschatology answers all these questions. If your eschatology is unformed, your doctrine—your beliefs—will be unformed as well.

Here is another way to define eschatology: it’s the study of the consummation of the purposes of God. All of God’s purposes find their consummation, their resolution, their completion, in biblical eschatology. It’s a glorious study. And at the center of those purposes, the climax of God’s redemptive work, the unifying theme of the Bible, the unifying theme of history itself, is Jesus Christ and him crucified.

So when you think about eschatology, make sure your thinking flows from the gospel.…Eschatology is the consummation of the gospel.

You can download his message (“The End Times”) from the Next website.

This post concludes our series of excerpts from the conference. Here's a list of all ten excerpts:

1. Old Atheism (Mark Dever)
2. Self-Atonement? (Mark Dever)
3. The Imitation of Christ (Mark Dever)
4. Disappointment with the Church (Kevin DeYoung)
5. De-Young Liners (Kevin DeYoung)
6. Plodding Visionaries (Kevin DeYoung)
7. Just Do Something (Kevin DeYoung)
8. The End Times (Jeff Purswell)
9. The Last One (Jeff Purswell)
10. The Crown of Theology (Jeff Purswell)

In Jeff Purswell’s message at Next 2010, “The End Times,” he made an important point about the focus of eschatology. When studying the end times, we are easily distracted from the grand purpose of it all: the revelation of Jesus Christ. Or to say it another way, eschatology is emphatically Christ-centered.

Jeff said it like this:

When the New Testament deals with eschatology, it is much more concerned with the last One than the last things. The early church looked not so much for a succession of events as they did for the arrival of a person. It was very personal for persecuted Christians. It should be very personal for us as well.

Let me put this in theological terms: eschatology is thoroughly Christological. It’s about Jesus. Christ’s return is like the hub of a wheel, and all the other stuff is like spokes coming off that wheel. And they only have meaning relative to the hub, relative to Christ’s return.

That’s not our normal tendency when it comes to this topic. Our tendency is to be fascinated with times and seasons and charts and graphs, the events of the end, the when and the how.

The Bible is primarily concerned with the Who. When the last One arrives, the succession of events will matter little.

You can download Jeff's message (“The End Times”) from the Next website.

There is often no lack of interest in—or confusion about—the topic of eschatology. So I was grateful that Jeff Purswell, dean of the Sovereign Grace Ministries Pastors College, took up the topic for his contribution to our Next 2010 conference in Baltimore.

Jeff brought both clarity and appropriate emphasis to this important topic, helping us avoid two of the dangers associated with the end times: speculation and negligence.

His message was a conference highlight.

What follows is an outline of the message and one excerpt (more excerpts are forthcoming). Let’s be clear—this is none other than my attempt to encourage you to listen to the entire message.

Jeff taught from 1 Thessalonians 4:13–5:11 and made these five important points:

1. Eschatology is rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
2. Eschatology is centered on the return of Christ.
3. Eschatology looks forward to perfect fellowship in the presence of God.
4. Eschatology pronounces the coming justice of God.
5. Eschatology provides hope and motivation for our daily lives now.

Jeff introduced us to the importance of the study of eschatology this way:

Here’s how we can sum up the thrust and import of eschatology: Eschatology assures us that God’s purposes will prevail, and it motivates us to live faithfully until those purposes are fulfilled. It changes the way we live. We live in light of those purposes and in light of the destination to which all things are heading.

You can download his message (“The End Times”) from the Next website.

To close out his Next 2010 conference message, “The Church,” Kevin DeYoung gave a list of suggestions for how to be a difference maker in the local church. He said: 

• Find a good local church.
• Get involved.
• Become a member.
• Stay there as long as you can.
• Put away thoughts of a revolution for a while.
• Join the plodding visionaries.
• Go to church this Sunday and worship in Spirit and truth.
• Be patient with your leaders.
• Rejoice when the gospel is faithfully proclaimed.
• Bear with those who hurt you.
• Give people the benefit of the doubt.
• Say “hi” to the teenager that no one notices.
• Welcome the old ladies with the blue hair and the young men with tattoos.
• Volunteer for the nursery.
• Attend the congregational meeting.
• Bring your fried chicken to the potluck like everybody else.
• Invite a friend.
• Take a new couple out for coffee.
• Give to the Christmas offering.
• Sing like you mean it.
• Be thankful someone vacuumed the carpet for you.
• Enjoy the Sundays that “click.”
• Pray extra hard on the Sundays that don’t.
• And in all of this, do not despise the days and weeks and years of small things (Zechariah 4:8–10).

I cannot recommend this message too highly. Please take time to download and listen to “The Church” by visiting the resource page at thisisnext.org.

There is one more message from the conference I want to highlight. We will do that next time.

As the pastor of a local church for 27 years, I am deeply grateful for every person who, when they came to Covenant Life Church, remained for many years. Those who persevered through the years and were patient with me personally and patient with my deficiencies in preaching—it was these people who ultimately made the difference in the church and helped build the church. They demonstrated their love for the Savior through their enduring service.

That's how local churches are built. Local churches are built when humble servants commit, and remain, and serve, and do so over a period of years. Local churches are built by those Kevin DeYoung identified as “plodding visionaries.” In his message at our Next conference in May, Kevin DeYoung made this compelling point.

He said:

It is easy to blast the church for all her failures. It is harder to live in the church day after day, year after year, with all of the ho hum, hum drum, and to slowly and consistently make a difference.

What we need are fewer revolutionaries and a few more plodding visionaries. We need to ask the right questions, we need to have the right expectations, and we need to establish the right vision.…

Here is my burden for our generation: along with all of the necessary pleas we have to be earnest and intense and radical and sold out. With all of that, I just also want to wave the banner from Zechariah 4:10, “Do not despise the days of small things.” That is what I mean by being plodding visionaries.

If you are a visionary, you don’t have your head in the sand. You are going somewhere. You are looking out. You are moving in a direction. But you are a plodder. One foot in front of the other.

Many of us are attracted to a Tasmanian Devil kind of Christianity…splattering, spinning around. You get fired up—praise God for that—and you spin out like the Tasmanian Devil ready to conquer the world for Christ and you blow up into a tree somewhere.

We need plodding visionaries.

When I wrote the book on the church I read nine books that called for a revolution. Every other day it seems like I read of a new manifesto. We may need to just simplify a little: Get on the right road and keep going.

Our generation in particular is prone to radicalism without follow-through. We want to change the world and we have never changed a diaper. You want to make a difference for Christ? Here is where you can start: this Sunday, volunteer for the nursery. Say, “Here I am, pastor. What can I do to serve?”

Without folks like this, Covenant Life Church would have never been built. No church can be built without plodding visionaries.

Kevin’s entire message, “The Church,” can be downloaded from the resource page at thisisnext.org.

Kevin DeYoung is unusually gifted with language. To listen to Kevin is to hear wit and wisdom packaged in a tight economy of words. And because of this he can make a single statement that is heart revealing and perspective altering.

Here is a sampling of statements you will hear throughout his Next conference message “The Church”:

• The Church is Christ’s bride. And why is it that so many people think it is cool to diss Jesus’ girlfriend?

• In this day with so much postmodern squishitude people are hungry to listen to someone winsomely, humbly, wisely, say—with passion and conviction—‘Thus saith the Lord.’

• What will it profit a man if he tries to transform the culture, but loses his own children?

• As long as God is interested in his glory, he will be interested and committed to the local church. He has a vested interest in your church. Nobody loves your church more than God.  

• Those of you who have issues with the church, let me warn you that disillusionment can become an idol. You can easily find your identity in being jaded.

• Our generation in particular is prone to radicalism without follow-through. We want to change the world and we have never changed a diaper.

• Can we be the young generation that loves and respects and looks up to the older generation?

• The Church is, in fact, the hope of the world, not because she gets it all right, but because she is a body with Christ for her head. So do not give up on the church. The New Testament knows nothing of churchless Christianity.  

To download and listen to the entire message—“The Church”—visit thisisnext.org.

Kevin DeYoung has written one of my favorite books on the local church (Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion) and recently he delivered what is now one of my favorite sermons on loving the local church (“The Church”).

The content of the sermon was excellent. And not only could I not take notes fast enough, I wanted all those in Sovereign Grace who were not in attendance at the Next conference to benefit from it. Therefore we decided to take some excerpts from the message in hope that they will create an appetite to listen to the message.

Who should listen to the message?

• Pastors
• Church members
• Those who love their church
• Those whose love for the church has been diminishing
• Those who think of involvement with the local church as optional
• Those who have left the local church
  

There is stuff in this message for us all.

In this first excerpt Kevin addressed the inevitable reality of disappointment in the local church. At some point we will all be disappointed with the church. Rather than being surprised by this we should be prepared and we should be ready to respond in a God-glorifying way.

At one point in his message Kevin introduced the various problems we read about in the church in Corinth:

Here you have a church with evidences of grace, but you have the church with all manner of problems. They have divisions and controversies and sexual immorality and power struggles and money issues and authority issues and marriage issues and anything else you can think of. That is the church.

So we ought to be realistic and I know many of you have disappointments that run very deep—deeper than I have experienced—and many of them are legitimate and people have hurt you, maybe pastors have hurt you. I am sorry. …

This is no way to excuse our own sinfulness, but it is to give us a realistic appraisal that saints and sinners we will always be. We will be disappointed at times.  

He goes on to explain the reason behind these disappointments:

I think one of the most important doctrines that is missing in younger generations today—and it is the reason that people can get so tired of the church so quickly—is the doctrine of original sin. The doctrine of original sin teaches that every single human being whoever was, is, or shall be—save for Jesus—inherited from Adam a sinful nature that makes us predisposed to wickedness and rebellion.  

“No one is righteous” (Romans 3:10).

“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).  

“The human heart is deceitful above all else and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9).

The natural man is “dead in the trespasses and sin” (Ephesians 2:1).

By nature we pass our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another (Titus 3:3).

“All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isaiah 53:6).

It is there over and over again in the pages of Scripture. And it is this doctrine with the related teachings of indwelling sin and the divided self that need to be recovered if we are to have a biblical, realistic appraisal of the local church.

So is your attitude and perspective of the local church informed by the doctrine of original sin? Is your appraisal of the local church realistic or idealistic? Please don’t misunderstand. There can be a time and place to transition from a particular local church. But prior to that decision we need to be informed by the content of Kevin’s message.

To download and listen to “The Church”—or any of the conference messages—visit thisisnext.org.

One of the great features of the Next conference each year is the stories about how the gospel and local churches are affecting individual lives. Four such testimonies were featured at the 2010 conference and each testimony was distinct and deeply moving. If you invest 24 minutes of your day watching them you will be personally edified and freshly reminded of God’s grace at work in your own life.
 
Here are the videos:
 
Ian Marshall

 
Update: Ian was drafted in the 40th round of the Major League Baseball draft by the Atlanta Braves.
 
Heather Evans


Erin Hill

 
Casey Frazier

Later in his NEXT conference message—”The Doctrine of Christ's Work Accomplished and Applied”—Mark helped make the connection between Christ as our Savior and Christ as our Example from his text in 1 Peter 2:21–25.

After stressing the atoning work of Christ (as we saw in the previous post), Mark focused on 1 Peter 2:21, “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.” He said:

Now some of you are going to be surprised to hear talk about Jesus as our example when I am speaking so clearly from Scripture about substitutionary atonement. But he is also our example. That is what Peter says here very clearly.

There is a theory of the atonement that theologians call the “moral example theory” and it emphasizes the example that Jesus is to us. But, friends, this doesn’t make any sense at all without the substitution of Jesus being understood.

How so?

Fundamentally, you understand the substitution of Jesus. On top of that understanding of what Jesus did and how he did it—then you understand how his life can be an example for us as we are called to imitate him in giving our lives in loving service for others, in being willing to suffer and even to die for doing good.

In other words, until we fully appreciate the work of the Savior we cannot follow the example of the Savior.

To download and listen to this message—or any of the conference messages—visit thisisnext.org.