Live albums are admittedly a mixed bag.

All too often they feature poor quality sound, tired arrangements of familiar songs, and a longing for the original, "studio" recording.

I still remember disappointment at the Moody Blues anemic Caught Live Plus Five.  Get the concept?  A recording of a Moody Blues concert plus five brand new songs!  It was one of those cases where the concept was greater than the reality.

Yet every so often, a song -- or an entire album -- overcomes the genre.  What results is a live recording that either improves an existing song or remakes it entirely.

So here below are five that in my experience -- and for my tastes -- have done just that:

5.  I Want You To Want Me, by Cheap Trick.  I personally never believed a  Cheap Trick song would ever appear on one of my Top Five Tuesday lists, but you have to admit that they put the phrase "live at Budokan" in the vernacular.



4.  Jailbreak, by Thin Lizzy.  Thin Lizzy is a much under-rated band and Jailbreak a much under-rated song.  I miss Phil Lynott's voice.



3.  Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash.  Has there ever been a better way to intro a song than "hello, I'm Johnny Cash." 



2.  I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For by U2.  I always knew that Still Haven't Found was at its heart a gospel song.  Then the backing of a gospel choir during the movie Rattle & Hum removed all doubt.  I still get goose bumps when Bono answers the choir's entrance with an elated, "All right!"  A sublime reinvention of an already beautiful song.



1.  Take It To The Limit by the Eagles.  Speaking of goose bumps, the musical crescendo coupled with Randy Meisner's falsetto at the song's finale gets me every time.  I saw and heard this song live at the very first concert I ever went to -- Fort Worth, Texas, 1977 -- and remember the awe Meisner's voice created in the audience.  The recording on the Eagles Live album captures the moment almost perfectly.  When Glenn Frey says at the end, "Very good, Randy" you've just got to agree. 

In the middle of preaching the sermon yesterday, I realized I was stepping into some people's hallowed ground.

Here's what I mean.

Our Baptist friends have a teaching called Once Saved, Always Saved.  Our Reformed & Presbyterian friends believe the same thing and call it Eternal Security. 

(If the fact that Baptists call it Once Saved, Always Saved and Presbyterians call it Eternal Security doesn't tell you everything you  need to know about the difference in style between Baptists and Presbyterians, nothing will.)

So what is this one doctrine with two names?  The teaching that once a person accepts salvation by grace through faith in Christ, he or she cannot lose it.  That person is always saved, continually protected by God's sovereign grace, and eternally secure. 

A person can neither lose nor deny what was given by grace.

If a person who gives verbal testimony of salvation at some point later rescinds that same testimony (denies the faith), our Baptist and Reformed friends generally offer one of two explanations:  1) the original conversion & confession was not genuine; or 2) the person will be ultimately be "saved" and go to heaven after death, all based on that one time (much earlier) confession of faith.

A number of Scriptures support Once Saved, Always Saved, including Romans 8:38-39, John 10:28-29, and I Corinthians 3:10-15.

Charles Stanley has written one of the most influential books on the subject.  You can check it out here.

Finally, proponents of this view use the analogy of childbirth & family: once a child is born into a family, they cannot be unborn out of it.  In the same way, the thinking goes, once a person is born again into the family of God, they cannot be unborn out of it.

So Eternal Security has an impressive list of adherents, a cross-section of Scriptures to buttress it, and a powerful analogy most of us can relate to.

But then . . . the book of Hebrews steps in. 

Time after time after time, it seems, the book challenges the thinking behind eternal security -- that a genuinely saved person can never fall out of that saving relationship.

First, there's Hebrews 2:1: We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.   A warning against drifting away.

Then Hebrews 3:12:  See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.    A stronger warning aginst turning away.

Next, Hebrews 6:4-8:  4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, 6 if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because[a] to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.  Everything in vv. 4-5 -- enlightened, tasting the heavenly gift, sharing in the Holy Spriti, tasted the goodness of the word & the powers of the coming age -- cries out, "Christian!"  So why would the Christian of vv. 4-5 receive such a stern warning against "falling away" in v. 6 if it were not possible for them to do so?  Now:  the rest of  v. 6 brings about a slew of interpretive issues . . . but that's another blog for another time.

Finally, Hebrews 10:26-27, the place I stepped yesterday in my sermon:  If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, ²⁷ but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.  The "we" of verse 26 is the key . . . it is a sermon to insiders, a message of warning to believers, and it is consistent with Hebrews' dire admonitions against falling away.

And how does this drifting away, turning away, falling away happen, according to Hebrews?  Does it come with a single moment of denying faith in Christ -- what most people refer to as apostasy?  Or does it come as a result of gradual yet escalating sinful rebellion against the God who saved your soul?

On that question -- perhaps the question in this dilemma -- Hebrews offers baffling silence.  Could the answer be "yes" to both?

So if I as a preacher cannot hold at the same time a belief in Eternal Security and a trust in the authority of the book of Hebrews, what am I to do? 

Thank God for Methodism.

One of the signature teachings of historic Methodism is the doctrine of assurance.  I call it the first cousin of Eternal Security. 

Assurance teaches that you can know for sure that you are saved.  That through a combination of objective evidence -- public confession of Christ -- and subjective experience -- the loving touch of the Holy Spirit -- a believer can know for sure that he or she is a child of God.

Does that mean it is impossible for that same person at some point to deny the faith?  No.  The same free will we had before conversion remains with us afterwards.

But, as Maxie Dunnam says, the question is not whether we can or can't deny the faith, the question is whether we will or won't. 

By God's grace, we won't. 

I claim and live I John 5:13 as testimony to the assurance of salvation:  I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know you have eternal life.  "Know" is the critical word there -- not "hope" or "wish" or "believe."  Know with certainty.

Since that's the gift that's offered, that's the gift I'll take.








 

Kenny Chesney knows How Forever Feels.

Rod Stewart wanted to be Forever Young.  (It didn't work, by the way).

Most of us want a BFF -- a best friend forever.

But how about a Forever Upgrade?

That's this Sunday.

But be warned.  The Forever Upgrade has to be teased out of one of the most terrifying sections in all of the bible.

I can't wait.

Sunday.

8:30.  10.  11:30.

I recently had a conversation with a fellow United Methodist pastor who reminded me that she had been on the denominational building committee which approved the final drawings for Good Shepherd's current Worship Center.

(That's denominational policy, by the way -- and a good one, as it keeps checks and balances between congregation and connection.)

Considering that we opened our building in May of 2005, I figure this particular meeting my friend remembered took place in late 2003 or early 2004. 

And her memories were tinged with some embarrassment.  She reminded me that the committee wanted to make sure that our Worship Center was Methodist enough. 

How do you make a worship space Methodist enough?  With appropriately colored liturgical paraments, a baptismal font, and a communion table. 

In other words, with symbols of the faith.  All things that will one day pass away.

You know what I wish they'd told us to do to make sure our worship space and worship gatherings were sufficiently Methodist?  You know what I kind of exhortations I wish they'd given me?

• Make sure you preach about prevenient grace and free will.
• Make sure you spread Scriptural holiness throughout the land.
• Make sure you remind people to flee the wrath to come.
• Make sure you offer them Christ.
• Make sure you plunge new converts into the waters of baptism.
• Make sure you teach on the Holy Spirit.
• Make sure you pray that Holy Spirit fills the people who come into that church.
• Make sure you have them leave that Worship Center and get into small groups.
• Make sure you have them sing 'loud and long.'

That kind of denominational accountability, I believe, would have been more than "Methodist enough."

Exegesis is the art and science of pulling out the meaning of a particular passage of Scripture.

The word comes from the combination of two Greek terms:  exo, which means out; and hegeisthai, a verb meaning "to lead, guide."

Exegesis is the opposite of eisegesis, which happens when the reader imports his or her previous understanding of the text in question into the interpretation.  Under eisegesis, readers take their biases and presuppositions and read them into the words of the bible rather than allowing the bible to read its own meaning out.

All that to say that someone who studies a passage carefully and then through the process of reading and research pulls out the interpretive meaning from within the text is an exegete.

All kinds of folks -- lay people, pastors, and scholars -- engage in the kind of interpretive work of an exegete.

Only these days, many serious exegetes are instead called homophobes.

I'll show you what I mean. 

Bible scholars from the earliest days of the church and continuing into today have exegeted passages such as Romans 1:18-32 and I Corinthians 6:9-20 and concluded that homosexual practice is outside God's will for the human race.

The conclusion comes from approaching those texts with an inquisitive mind and commitment to the exegetical process -- and then guiding the meaning out from the words of Scripture.

Today's experts do so with no malice, no sense of glee, no spirit of triumphalism and no gay-bashing.  Instead, after serious study, scholars such as Ben Witherington and Robert Gagnon -- hardly members of Westboro Baptist Church, those two -- remind us that if Scripture has any continuing authority over the life of the church, the church needs to teach that homosexual intimacy is not God's design for men and women.

Sadly, if you align yourself with these longstanding exegetical conclusions in 2012 you run the risk of being given that new name I mentioned earlier:  homophobe.  I've been called that on this blog.  Other pastors and professors who preach and teach sexual orthodoxy have as well.  That word -- that name -- gets flung around pretty freely in the United Methodist debate over homosexuality . . . and never to the end of elevating the conversation.

As if the serious study of and honest conclusion about Scripture means you have an irrational fear of people with same-sex attraction and behavior.

Honestly, I wish Scripture wasn't so unanimous in its lament over homosexual intercourse. 

But it is. 

So my "phobia" these days has nothing to do with homosexuality.

And everything to do with the fear that I might somehow allow my wishes to influence my exegesis.