By Amber Bruce
Have you heard about our monthly small group leader training opportunities? Starting Sunday, March 8th we will be hosting monthly trainings for you during second service in the Ridgeview Rooms.
This month we will be talking about the Art of Multiplication and Identifying New Leaders. We figured this was a relevant topic as we prepare to launch new groups for the upcoming spring sermon series. Jim and Lorna Dirks along with a few other experienced leaders will be sharing.
Please RSVP if you are able to join us. We want to have enough seats and snacks for you.
Also – Save the Dates for…..
- Sunday, April 19th Developing Fishers of Men Through Small Groups/Finishing Strong
- Friday& Saturday, May 1-2 “Reasonable Faith in an Uncertain World” Conference
- Sunday, May 31st Summer Rejuvenation and Connection
- Saturday, June 13th Leader Celebration Dinner and Annual Bethel Business Meeting
By joshuatucker
Last year we asked you to fill out a survey about ways we could serve you better as group leaders. Many of you asked for help in “facilitating life-giving discussion” and “staying ‘hot’ as a leader.” As we try to serve you in these areas, we put together a video playlist totaling 18 minutes in length which give really practical insight for leading great discussion. It includes topics like: how to foster better participation, how to pray together, and how to handle difficult situations that come up in group. We hope you enjoy watching these videos, and we pray you find them encouraging for your ministry.
Click here to access the video training. It will ask you to sign-in before viewing it.
By Amber Bruce
At Bethel, our mission is to make disciples. We define a disciple as a follower of Jesus who is GROWing (God-lover, Relationship-Builder, Obedient Follower and World-Influencer). GROW came from a study of the more than 800 commands in the New Testament. Grouping those commands into categories, we came up not only with the acrostic GROW, but with several commands that fit in each one. Under the category of “God-lover,” one of the attributes of a disciple is that he or she believes the gospel is God’s only plan for salvation (Acts 4:12; Rom 1:16; John 14:6). Included in that belief is the idea that we need salvation from God’s wrath. Bethel’s statement of beliefs includes the following paragraph:
Bethel Beliefs: The Last Things
We believe in “that blessed hope” (Titus 2:13) the personal, visible, pre-millennial return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We believe in the bodily resurrection of the just and the unjust, the everlasting blessedness of the saved and the everlasting conscious suffering of the lost. (Zechariah 14:4-11; Matthew 25:46; John 5:28-29; 11:25-26; Acts 1:11; 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18; Revelation 20:4-6, 11-15)
Many in our culture stumble over the apparent contradiction of a loving God who is also a judging God. We cling to the deep-seated belief that we can decide for ourselves what is right and wrong; therefore a loving God should support us no matter what we do. We may not consciously agree to the statement “moral truth is relative,” but if we chafe under the idea of a God who judges, then we do believe it at some level.
Because this belief is so pervasive, we have this post as an extra tool for leaders to explore answers to the question, “How can a loving God send people to hell?” It is a question with which we all must wrestle; if not for ourselves, then for the many people we love who stumble over it.
First, we must remember that God is a God of love. First John 4:8 tells us that God is not only loving but “God is love.” In other words, God defines love by his existence and exemplifies love in his actions. God’s love is expressed fully and perfectly in the death of his Son Jesus on the cross (John 3:16). In redemption, as Reverend Charles F. Whiston points out, “we watch God meet our evil with his own unconquerable, agonizing love; meet it, stop it, overcome it.”
In our culture, the ideal of a loving God is something we all like to believe. But that idea comes only from the Bible. Reverend Tim Keller writes how he discovered during his college days that no other religion has a personal, loving God at the center:
“Like so many of my generation I believed that, if there was a core to all religions, it was a loving God. I wanted to believe in a God of love who accepted people regardless of their beliefs and practices. I began to take courses in the other major religions of the world – Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, and Judaism. … [M]y explorations in other faiths proved me wrong on this particular point about the centrality of a loving God.
“I found no other religious text outside of the Bible that said God created the world out of love and delight. …I turned to look more closely at Buddhism, the religion I like best at the time. However, despite its great emphasis on selflessness and detached service to others, Buddhism did not believe in a personal God at all, and love is the action of a person.”
Tim Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Dutton, 2008), Chap 5 “How Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?
The same Bible that teaches that God is love also teaches about God’s judgment. You can’t pick just one part to believe in. If you want a God who is loving, you must also accept a God who is sovereign, holy, and just.
It seems to many of us that anger is in contrast to love. However, anger and love are not mutually exclusive. In his book The Reason for God, Tim Keller argues, “The Bible says that God’s wrath flows from his love and delight in creation. He is angry at evil and injustice because it is destroying [his creation’s] peace and integrity.”
Not only is wrath compatible with love, it is a requirement for a God worthy of our praise. How could we respect a God who would do nothing about all the evil and sin and death and injustice in this world? Czech philosopher and theologian Miroslav Volf makes the point that the only way we can love others without becoming bitter and violent and the only way we can worship God is if he has a plan to ultimately right all wrongs.
“If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence – that God would not be worthy of worship.”
Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996), p.303.
The God of the Bible is worthy of our worship. He promises that he and he alone will bring justice (Deuteronomy 32:35,41,43).
Unless we can trust in God’s plan to settle all accounts perfectly, we will find ourselves embittered at the injustices done to us and to those we love. We will feel the need for vengeance and “be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation,” as Tim Keller calls it. When we trust in God’s provision to right all wrongs, we can forgive others and wait patiently for God’s justice to be made known. If the offender repents and trusts in Christ, his wrongs are paid for on the cross. If not, his wrongs will be paid for in eternal condemnation in hell.
Why eternity? The Bible teaches that this life is not all there is; each of us will exist for eternity. Whether that eternal destiny is in heaven or hell depends on our submission to or rebellion against God now. Our actions in this life have everlasting consequences because we are everlasting beings.
Handel’s masterpiece The Messiah culminates in the Hallelujah chorus, which declares with the angel in Revelation 11:15 “The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.”
Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.” And the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying,
“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty,
who is and who was,
for you have taken your great power
and begun to reign.
The nations raged,
but your wrath came,
and the time for the dead to be judged,
and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints,
and those who fear your name,
both small and great,
and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.”
Revelation 11:15-18
In the context, God has just poured out his wrath on his enemies and begun to reign on earth, eliciting jubilant praise from the rulers of men who sit in God’s presence. These rulers act as our representatives; we will be singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” along with them because God destroyed the destroyers of the earth (v. 18) and has begun to reign.
In Revelation 22:3-5, we see that destruction of God’s enemies leads to the renewal of the entire created order, the restoration of harmony and peace.
No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
Revelation 22:3-5
Only after the “destroyers of the earth” are gone can the earth once again be a perfect home in which the Lamb will live forever with his bride, the people whom He has redeemed out of all the nations through His atoning death. No longer will the earth be cursed for Adam’s sin. No longer will guilt, strife, struggle for survival, sickness, sorrow, and death have any place in the earth.
Beyond the restoration of peace and harmony, God will give us Himself, the riches of His glory, forever. Moses could not see God’s face and live (Exodus 33:20-23; 34:29-35), but when the Spirit has completed our sanctification, God’s redeemed people will see His face. The ESV Study Bible calls this “the greatest blessing of the age to come, as God looks upon his people with favor and delight.” Part of a poem by John Piper captures this hope of delighting in the riches of God’s glory forever:
What we have lost, God will restore -
That, and himself, forevermore.
When he is finished with his art:
The quiet worship of our heart.
The reality of eternal destinations may seem harsh in the beginning, but as our eyes adjust to the light of the truth we will begin to recognize the beauty before us. The darkness of sin and judgment makes God’s mercy shine more brightly in comparison. As we receive and revel in God’s mercy, it begins to fill us so that our own lives radiate with mercy. We have that “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13) that God will not only restore peace but will give us Himself to enjoy forever.
