Singing in the Chains
The waters off Vancouver Island, British Columbia, are clear and cold, making for some of the best scuba diving in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather can be cloudy, making the ocean steel gray with flecks of white, but below the surface are teeming schools of wildly colorful fish. When pastor and writer Mark Buchanan emerges from the water in his scuba gear, he is inevitably grinning. The author of books like Your God Is Too Safe and The Rest of God consistently finds surprises in deep places. So we thought he was an important voice to respond to the Christian Vision Project's big question for 2008: Is our gospel too small?
I had a Paul-like conversion.
There were no horses, voices, blindness—no bloody trail at my feet. But it was dramatic. Something like scales fell from my eyes. I stood in the shadow of Christ's cross and in the light of his resurrection. Christ met me, embraced me, forgave me, and gave me himself. I never looked back.
That was more than 25 years ago. For 18 of those years I've been a pastor, a fact that has not yet ceased to amaze me: that God would take me, the worst of sinners, the least of the "apostles," and make me his chosen vessel to carry his name before kings and gentiles and homemakers and dentists and plumbers and schoolchildren.
How could a gospel that performed such a feat be too small?
I was saved into a midsized Baptist church, suburban in its sentiments, conservative in its theology. It was a world both familiar and strange to me. The music was awful, third-rate lyrics set to fourth-rate melodies, as C. S. Lewis is said to have described the music at his Anglican church. The preaching was interminable and often bewildering, an exercise in splitting hairs over doctrinal points that, until ...
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justgroovy
My take on the "Miracle in the Jail" is this; the miracle was not that the doors were opened and the chains fell off. The miracle was that under the most difficult circumstances they were doing behind bars what they would have been doing with the other believers in some upper room. They did not let their circumstances dictate their actions. They let their "vision" that Christ had imparted to them lead them to live a live of fellowship and devotion wherever they were. The gospel was truly a new way of being and they embraced it without hesitation. What could Man truly do to them that Christ had not already endured? Could they do no less? That is the mark of faith that the world marvels at when they get a glimpse of it.
Tim Stradling
"Buchanan is blessed because he believes and has not seen nor heard the voice of Christ and so he receives blessing upon blessing upon blessing." "Has not seen nor heard" ... I don't understand why the writer makes this conclusion. Buchanan seems to be seeing and hearing quite well to me. I have been seeking God's wisdom on this subject for weeks prompted by a conference with Steve Deneff. His book "More Than Forgiveness" might be helpful if you are interested in why the gospel today seems weak and ineffective. Also, it's interesting to note that to the Gentile mind of the Philippian "to be saved," Greek "soteria," had to do with being "released from the governing the fate of man and the material world" Longenecker, Expositor's Bible Commentary Acts. So, the jailer (and/or Luke) was certainly alluding to the girl who had been delivered from the power of the spirit in the beginning of the passage. And, to be saved means more of being delivered from the "powers" that control us.
Ephrem Hagos
The Jews, the Muslims and the Christians all have what it takes not just to know about but even to know personally and firsthand Jesus Christ as the immortal God with the self-sufficient life revealed, first, in the burning bush and, lastly, in the unique and absolutely stunning manner of His exclusively self-inflicted and self-revealing death on the cross --a mystery which, strangely enough, is today more in the minds of Muslims than Christians. To judge from the Book of Acts and Paul's epistles, this is the power and the glory he had earlier seen in vision on the road to Damascus and now together with Silas acknowledged in singing and praise; and for which they deemed themselves honored to be beaten and imprisoned. It is this explicit praise to the supernatural demonstration of the living and immortal Christ who was crucified in public only recently and, therefore, still fresh in the minds of the inmates and jailer that elicited the question "What must I do to be saved?"