Sovereign Grace Fellowship has left the building!!!
January 15th, 2013 by Alex Camacho
SGF has moved to a new location! We meet on Sundays at 10am at The South Bay Adult School. Address is 3401 Inglewood Ave, Redondo Beach, Ca 90278. See you there!!
Pastor Joe's blog
Let Pastor's Pastor, by Kevin DeYoung
October 26th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
Recently I was talking with a ministry friend of mine, a man I like and respect. He loves the lost and wants to see churches make an impact in their communities. He has gifts and insights that I can learn from. But I was caught off guard by something he said about Ephesians 4:11. He argued that for too long we’ve trained pastors to be shepherds and teachers, when the time has now come to train them to be apostles, prophets, and evangelists. The second half of verse 11 might have worked in a different time, but in today’s world we need ministers who more resemble the first half of the verse. His point was that we have lots of pastors who are well-equipped to care for the flock and teach the finer points of doctrine, but precious few who can exercise dynamic leadership and get into the community to make a difference and build the kingdom. I’ve heard these arguments many times, in pockets of the church that are conservative and evangelical, and sometimes in pockets of the church more or less reformed. No one says that teaching is a waste or that doctrine can be ignored. But the general sentiment is that good preaching and congregational care are pretty well taken care of. What we really need are innovators, visionary-leaders, entrepreneurs, and community change-agents. The nature of pastoral ministry accounts for much of what divides the evangelical world, and even the smaller tribe of the new Calvinists. I don’t mean “divide” in a nasty schismatic way (though I suppose that happens too). I simply mean that you can get a group of pastors together who share almost all the same theology, but hardly agree on anything about “doing church” because they don’t have the same roles and goals in mind for pastoral ministry. Often these disagreements go unstated and simmer below the surface, and good Christians wonder what the hang up really is. Let me a venture a few reflections on this disagreement, the nature of pastoral ministry, and Ephesians 4:11 in particular. God gifts some people to be innovators, visionary-leaders, entrepreneurs, and community change-agents. We should be thankful for Christians who love people and serve their cities in that way. These kinds of gifts can be especially useful for church planters and those working in places with few Christians around. If “apostle” means the ability to start a new thing in a new place, and “prophet” means the ability to speak into our culture, and “evangelist” means the ability to connect with non-Christians, then these are gifts many pastors would do very well to have and to cultivate. Different pastors will excel in different areas of ministry. Some will excel in turning things around, some in wading through conflict, some in keeping a good thing going, and others in starting from scratch. In a country where the religious “nones” continue to rise, pastors need to see their communities may be changing in ways that significantly affect their ministries. Having said all that, we should not read our own definitions into important biblical terminology. While there may be apostle-like gifts and prophet-like gifts, Paul considered the office of apostle and the office of prophet to be uniquely foundational in the life of the church (2:20; 3:5). Paul didn’t say that Christ gave to the church some people who start things and some people who speak in the culture and some people who connect with non-Christians. Those may all be good things and even gifts from the Spirit, but we shouldn’t assume our commonsense notions of pastoral training are what Paul had in mind by these specific offices. It’s telling that the office of pastor/elder/overseer is described chiefly as one of shepherding and teaching (Acts 20:28; 1 Tim. 5:17; 1 Peter 5:2; cf. John 21:16). Timothy is also told to “do the work of an evangelist” (2 Tim. 4:5), though the context suggests public preaching rather than a vague sense of being able to connect with non-Christians. If we read through the New Testament, and especially the pastoral epistles, we must conclude that responsibility of the pastor is not to cast vision or start new programs or even to engage with the community. His main responsibility is to shepherd the flock entrusted under his care, proclaim Christ, and faithfully pass on the apostolic teaching. It’s also worth noticing what the four (or five) offices listed in Ephesians 4:11 all have in common. They all assume teaching gifts and are teaching offices. The apostles and prophets were the foundational teachers, the evangelists were (perhaps) itinerant teachers, and the shepherd-teachers were the pastors teaching in the local congregation. In one sense, the offices do not vary all that much. Christ’s singular gift to the church is in providing men who can boldly, clearly, and persuasively teach the whole counsel of God. Which brings me to my final point and the title of this post: let pastors be pastors. There are men who want to love a church, lead their fellow elders, and preach solid sermons. And yet, they feel like they don’t have the entrepreneurial gifts or visionary personality to cut it in today’s church. They may still be called to pastoral ministry. Conversely, there are men entering the pastorate because they have great gifts for making things happen and great passion for changing their communities, but they should not be pastors because they cannot teach and have little patience for loving an actual congregation. I’m not at all convinced that our pastors are prepared to preach good sermons and shepherd a congregation. But even if we’ve been nailing this training for fifty years, it doesn’t make the continuing need any less real. Pastoral ministry as God describes it may not seem particularly relevant or cutting edge. But if we truly love our people, keep watch over their souls, and preach the word of God week after week, I’m willing to bet God’s people will be the entrepreneurial, cultural-engaging, community-shaping people we want them to be. We just have to get our calling squared away first.
The Courage to Put Away our Cameras
August 6th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
The Courage to Put Away Our Cameras by Russ Ramsey on July 26, 2012 "One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home." Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse Oh, to have been present at San Diego's Glorietta Bay on July 4, 2012. If I add up all the Fourth of Julys, Friday Nights at baseball stadiums and New Years celebrations, I bet I've seen close to fifty different fireworks displays over the course of my life. I've seen them from my seat in the third balcony at Busch Stadium, from the bed of a pickup truck in rural Indiana, and from a community college front lawn in Kansas City. There was even the fortuitous occasion where I was sitting in the window seat of a Delta flight over St. Louis thirty minutes after dark on Independence Day. Dozens of bursts of light dotted the landscape below as far as I could see. I was surprised by how small they looked from 30,000 feet. Then there was the time I lay on the pavement of the casino parking lot in an Indian Reservation in central Washington where normal zoning and safety laws did not apply. The rockets burst in the sky directly overhead, raining down little bits of acrid paper all around us. But nothing I've ever seen could come close to what the people of San Diego witnessed this past Fourth of July. What was supposed to be a twenty-minute display ended up lasting just fifteen seconds as a malfunction in the detonators caused the entire display-hundreds of individual fireworks-to all go off at once. Here's the thing. And I promise you this is true. I am not a fireworks enthusiast. I don't buy them from roadside stands. I don't angle for the best seat at the fairgrounds. I don't purchase patriotic t-shirts. But when I think about those thousands who gathered at Glorietta Bay, I get a little jealous. Why? Because those fortunate folks in San Diego witnessed what will likely be the greatest fireworks display of my lifetime. And I wasn't there. They got to see something no video or picture will ever do justice to. You can't capture moments like that on film or phone. You just have to be there. So many things in life fall into this category-events you simply cannot bottle for later-like the birth of a child, the funeral of a loved one, a sunset, the presentation and enjoyment of a great meal, a surprise party, a concert, climbing out of a cold tent in the mountains and restoking the campfire as you watch the sun come up, sifting through the rubble of a flood or a fire, kissing your daughter's forehead as the nurses wheel her off to surgery, asking your girlfriend to marry you, or watching a thunderstorm roll in. In our amazing era of digital immediacy, I can tell the world where I am and what I'm doing while I'm doing it. I can present myself as a busy man living a rich and full life. I can take pictures of my meals, log my locations, snap photos of the people I'm with, and weigh in on what's happening around the globe 140 characters at a time. But none of these things mean I've been paying attention. The degree to which we are able to be present in the moment, psychologists say, is one of the chief indicators of mental health and security in our personal identity. I can buy that. And I would submit that this takes a lot of courage. Every day of my life is filled with moments that cannot be captured-moments more glorious than what took place on that San Diego night. We have to hold these moments with an open hand and pay attention. But it's hard to pay attention, isn't it? When it comes to wonder and glory, if we're honest wouldn't we have to confess that there comes a point where we run out of the courage to remain engaged, where we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home comforted by the fact that we took a lot of great pictures? Take all the pictures you want. They'll only serve to instruct you in the truth that none of your clips or still images managed to capture what was really happening in the moment. Go ahead. Watch this pretty awesome video of the 2012 San Diego fireworks and you'll know, as amazing as it is, that you're not seeing anything close to what those who gathered there in the bay that night actually experienced. Life is filled with wonder and beauty. Tonight's sunset is a gift we cannot preserve for tomorrow. But tomorrow, we'll get a new one. And another the night after that. It's okay to put away our cameras. "Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." -Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse
How, "Let go and let God" Almost Ruined J.I. Packer's Spiritual Life
July 16th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
J. I. Packer, in his introduction to John Owen's The Mortification of Sin, writes of his conversion and near spiritual destruction: I was converted-that is, I came to the Lord Jesus Christ in a decisive commitment, needing and seeking God's pardon and acceptance, conscious of Christ's redeeming love for me and his personal call to me -in my first university term, a little more than half a century ago. The group nurturing me was heavily pietistic in style, and left me in no doubt that the most important thing for me as a Christian was the quality of my walk with God: in which, of course, they were entirely right. They were also, however, somewhat elitist in spirit, holding that only Bible-believing evangelicals could say anything worth hearing about the Christian life, and the leaders encouraged the rest of us to assume that anyone thought sound enough to address the group on this theme was sure to be good. I listened with great expectation and excitement to the preachers and teachers whom the group brought in week by week, not doubting that they were the top devotional instructors in Britain, perhaps in the world. And I came a cropper. Whether what I thought I heard was what was really being said may be left an open question, but it seemed to me that what I was being told was this. There are two sorts of Christians, first-class and second-class, 'spiritual' and 'carnal' (a distinction drawn from the King James rendering of 1 Cor. 3:1-3). The former know sustained peace and joy, constant inner confidence, and regular victory over temptation and sin, in a way that the latter do not. Those who hope to be of use to God must become 'spiritual' in the stated sense. As a lonely, nervy, adolescent introvert whose new-found assurance had not changed his temperament overnight, I had to conclude that I was not 'spiritual' yet. But I wanted to be useful to God. So what was I to do? 'Let go, and let God' There is a secret, I was told, of rising from carnality to spirituality, a secret mirrored in the maxim: Let go, and let God. I vividly recall a radiant clergyman in an Oxford pulpit enforcing this. The secret had to do with being Spirit-filled. The Spirit-filled person, it was said, is taken out of the second half of Romans 7, understood (misunderstood, I would now maintain) as an analysis of constant moral defeat through self-reliance, into Romans 8, where he walks confidently in the Spirit and is not so defeated. The way to be Spirit-filled, so I gathered, was as follows. First, one must deny self. Did not Jesus require self-denial from his disciples (Luke 9:23)? Yes, but clearly what he meant was the negating of carnal self - that is to say self-will, self-assertion, self-centredness and self-worship, the Adamic syndrome in human nature, the egocentric behaviour pattern, rooted in anti-God aspirations and attitudes, for which the common name is original sin. What I seemed to be hearing, however, was a call to deny personal self, so that I could be taken over by Jesus Christ in such a way that my present experience of thinking and willing would become something different, an experience of Christ himself living in me, animating me, and doing the thinking and willing for me. Put like that, it sounds more like the formula of demon-possession than the ministry of the indwelling Christ according to the New Testament. But in those days I knew nothing about demon-possession,and what I have just put into words seemed to be the plain meaning of 'I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me' (Gal. 2:20, KJV) as expounded by the approved speakers. We used to sing this chorus: O to be saved from myself, dear Lord, O to be lost in thee; O that it may be no more I But Christ who lives in me! Whatever its author may have meant, I sang it wholeheartedly in the sense spelled out above. The rest of the secret was bound up in the double-barrelled phrase consecration and faith. Consecration meant total self-surrender, laying one's all on the altar, handing over every part of one's life to the lordship of Jesus. Through consecration one would be emptied of self, and the empty vessel would then automatically be filled with the Spirit so that Christ's power within one would be ready for use. With consecration was to go faith, which was explained as looking to the indwelling Christ moment by moment, not only to do one's thinking and choosing in and for one, but also to do one's fighting and resisting of temptation. Rather then meet temptation directly (which would be fighting in one's own strength), one should hand it over to Christ to deal with, and look to him to banish it. Such was the consecration-and-faith technique as I understood it-heap powerful magic, as I took it to be, the precious secret of what was called victorious living. But what happened? I scraped my inside, figuratively speaking, to ensure that my consecration was complete, and laboured to 'let go and let God' when temptation made its presence felt. At that time I did not know that Harry Ironside, sometime pastor of Moody Memorial Church, Chicago, once drove himself into a full-scale mental breakdown through trying to get into the higher life as I was trying to get into it; and I would not have dared to conclude, as I have concluded since, that this higher life as described is a will-o'-the-wisp, an unreality that no one has ever laid hold of at all, and that those who testify to their experience in these terms really, if unwittingly, distort what has happened to them. All I knew was that the expected experience was not coming. The technique was not working. Why not? Well, since the teaching declared that everything depends on consecration being total, the fault had to lie in me. So I must scrape my inside again to find whatever maggots of unconsecrated selfhood still lurked there. I became fairly frantic. And then (thank God) the group was given an old clergyman's library, and in it was an uncut set of Owen, and I cut the pages of volume VI more or less at random, and read Owen on mortification-and God used what the old Puritan had written three centuries before to sort me out. So if we don't "let go and let God," how do we kill sin? For Packer, Owen showed him the biblical answers: "I owe more, I think, to John Owen than to any other theologian, ancient or modern, and I am sure I owe more to his little book on mortification than to anything else he wrote." You can read the rest of this introduction for a brief overview, or go on to read Owen's book for yourself.
Steve Saint Accident
June 25th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
Parenting
June 16th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
Do You Have an Accountability Partner?
May 25th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
R. C. Sproul Jr. talks about being asked by a deacon at church twenty years ago if he had an "accountability group." When it was explained that this would be " a group of men who are active in your life, that care for you enough to challenge you when you fall into sin. They watch out for you, support you, encourage you to grow in grace and wisdom." He responded that he did have an "accountability group" in that case-"It's just that I call them my friends." Twenty years later he is hearing the same questions: When people find out about the loss of my wife, they suggest that I find myself a group, Though I seek to mask my skepticism, it apparently shows through. "Really," folks tell me," you need people that you can talk to, that you can be real with. You need people you can count on to be there for you." The answer is the same. I understand the need. And it is well met in my life, by my friends. Now I have nothing against accountability, nor accountability groups. I am positively in favor of grieving, and have nothing against groups built around that theme. What puzzles me on both counts, however, is how we have lost what is natural, and sought to replace it with programs. What does it say about the culture, both inside and outside the church, that callings normally born by friends now are met by something so artificial, so inorganic. These groups strike me as the emotional equivalent of a multivitamin. Sure enough many of us are not getting enough vitamin D or zinc in our diets. But isn't eating a few more veggies a better way to solve the problem? He goes on to talk about the importance of authenticity, communication, and intentionality: Institutional solutions to relational problems at least do this for us-they expose our relational weaknesses. If our lifestyles make healthy meals a challenge, we need to change our lifestyles. If the transience and cyber-ness of our relationships make, well, friendship, a problem we need to change how we relate. We need to love near, and serve near. And if, on the other hand, we have healthy relationships-real, personal relationships where we encourage one another toward righteousness, where we are free to be ourselves, where we talk with depth, and love with sincerity, we yet have this to do- we need to give thanks. We need not create a gratitude committee at our local church to create a gratitude program. No, we need to give thanks. So here I do. I have friends and family that love and care for me and my children. They check up on me. They look me in the eye when they talk to me. They hug me when they see me. They tell me they love me, and joyfully receive my love in return. They mourn when I mourn, as I rejoice when they rejoice. And I pray that they know that I give thanks to Him for them. I have friends, more and better than I deserve. This is not a critique of accountability, but raises the question of its institutionalization or systematic implementation. For some I think this is necessary and helpful. But it may not be for those who have engaged and active friends who ask good questions and know how to listen well.
This Momentary Marriage: Ian & Larissa's Story
May 8th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
Charles Colson (1931-2012)
April 24th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
Real-Life Echoes of the Story of Christ
March 12th, 2012 by Pastor Joe
Here's a model of how to write and deliver a speech...especially for you High School and college kids.