The Apostle Paul urged Christians to “confess your sins, one to another.” I guess the church has fallen on hard times in that regard. In many of the churches I used to attend, confessing to any of the ‘big sins’ (sex mostly, but drinking, drugs or stealing were almost as bad) was a one-way ticket to being ostracized. Lip service was given to God’s grace, but it was always diluted with warnings about cheap grace or possible abuses.

I’ll never forget the first time I visited a Lutheran church. The service began like this: (no announcements or words of welcome)

Pastor: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Congregation: Amen.

Pastor: If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

Congregation: But if we confess our sins, God, who is faithful and just, will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

After a period of silence, the Pastor continued: Let us then confess our sins to God our Father.

Congregation: Most merciful God, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We justly deserve your present and eternal punishment. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Holy Name.

Pastor: Almighty God has given his Son to die for you and for His sake forgives you all of your sins. As a called and ordained servant of the Word, I therefore forgive you all of your sins in the name of the Father, and of the, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Congregation: Amen.

Now imagine this in a sanctuary with a couple hundred people, all responding in perfect unison. Not only was it powerful, but I found it to be outrageous. Outrageously grace-filled and Christ-centered. Here were people who took Christ at His word regarding their sins. With my sins out of the way, I could actually more fully participate in the worship because my conscience wasn’t weighed down with all the guilt over my sins from the past week.

I also have to respect the bold and forthright way of dealing with the most unpleasant aspect of our relationship with God, namely our sin. When you start worship in this way, it’s serious business, and not easily given to levity or entertainment. It’s not a show for the visitors and unbelievers. It’s about receiving God’s gifts, and praying, praising, and giving thanks in return.

This was something I really needed, having washed up on the shores of the last church I was ever going to try, a bruised reed and a smoldering wick. I was sick to death of sermons on “biblical principles” for having a “godly relationship” or five biblical steps to overcoming this sin or that sin, none of which ever worked. Finally, here were a people who said “Enough… Repent!” and called sin for what it is, and urged the real biblical solution – repentance and forgiveness.

I often give my Evangelical friends a hard time, telling them that Lutherans don’t need altar calls because we have everyone repent and recite the sinner’s prayer right out of the gate at the beginning of the service. All joking aside though, the public confession and absolution was an apt word for me when I needed it most.

I can already anticipate the objections of those of you unfamiliar with the Lutheran tradition.

The first is “How can a man forgive sins?” (Hmm…. I’ve heard that somewhere before, but I digress.) Answer: John 20:21-23, Matt 18:15-18. Jesus gives the power to forgive and retain sins to His apostles, and by extension to all those called into an ordained ministry. This is the best explanation of that passage that I have heard, and it takes the text at face value.

The second is “Just repeating words on a page over and over is ‘vain repetition’ and after awhile people don’t mean it.” True enough, some people may not mean it, but if you repeat those words every Sunday, someday you will be in a fight for your life against a besetting sin, and they’ll mean something then. To those of us who pay attention, those words mean something every day; they are life and death. They allow me to tell the truth about my life to God, my neighbor, and to myself, and allow me to hear God’s gracious reply with my own ears.

Our very first podcast!

To kick our new podcasting off with a bang, we’ve invited Dr. Rod Rosenbladt of the White Horse Inn radio program and Rick Ritchie of OldSolar.com to join in a round table discussion about Michael Spencer’s recent article regarding the coming collapse of evangelicalism.

As this is our first attempt at this, please keep in mind that this is going to be a little rough and as a host, I’m still getting used to working in this format. We’re working to improve it quickly, and we hope you enjoy the content.

Not all our podcasts will feature guests like these, but we will do it as often as we can. Also, for now, please bear with us as our podcast schedule is going to be an irregular one, and not terribly frequent – maybe once or twice a month. But we will be increasing the frequency as time goes on, so make sure you add us to your regular podcasts.

Hey, producing good quality stuff takes time and effort!

Speaking of which, please note that the feed for this podcast is not yet set up correctly, but we’ll get there! For now, you can listen to it here on the blog directly or download the MP3 to listen on your local devices.

Intro and wrap up music is by Josh Garrels in his Over Oceans album. The intro is from track #11, Train Song, and the wrap up is from track #10, YHWH.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I became a Christian twenty eight years ago. The first nine years of that period were spent in a Holiness Church. (For those who are unfamiliar with this form of Christianity, its main focus is on becoming ‘entirely sanctified’, or to live without any known sin in your life. They are big on rules.) I went to their Bible College, and ministered in a small congregation in that denomination for a couple years. The Bible College president got up in chapel one day and stated that “If you miss God’s will for your life, you will end up a knick-knack on the back shelf of God’s five-and-dime.” Of course he and the other administrators were more than happy to tell us what that will was. (It involved moving with the college from Texas to its new location in Oklahoma.) The stress of avoiding and overcoming sin was bad enough, now we had to worry about ‘finding God’s will’. More than a few kids just broke. Some walked away, others abandoned the faith entirely. Still others got kicked out going down in a blaze of drinking and sex. Me, I was naïve; I figured this whole Jesus thing must work, I just hadn’t figured it out yet. So I stayed.

I felt like I was living a lie though. No matter how much praying and Bible reading I did, I just couldn’t seem to gain the “victory” over sin. In fact, reading Scripture and praying only made me realize how truly bad I was. It also helped me to see where this group was biblically lacking. I embarked on a search for a better way, a better theology, one that would deliver on the promise to rid me of my lusts and hatred, that would enable me to live the ‘Christian Life’ that I had been taught we needed to live to please God, and not move to Oklahoma.

My search led me to a very large Southern Baptist Church which I enjoyed greatly, but I still had the nagging guilt that I was a sinner and possibly outside of God’s grace. These were some miserable years. I was obsessed with following Jesus, but convinced that He pretty much hated me because of whatever sin was troubling me at the time. I heard the gospel at that Baptist Church, but after my fifteenth rededication realized that this wasn’t doing it for me either.

Shortly thereafter, my wife and I moved to California and discovered the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. Finally, we had found what we needed. God’s Spirit was ‘moving powerfully’, renewing believers who were discouraged and defeated, people were being converted to Christ, and there were all these really cool ‘manifestations’ of God’s ‘power’, or so we thought. After a string of scandals we were having some serious reservations. Then the ‘prophets’ showed up. They were clearly false prophets expounding heretical doctrines and using threats of God’s judgment against any who would question them. By this time we had become deeply involved in this ministry, but it was just too much. I declared a church fast and we quit attending church altogether. We quit our small group, we quit working with the ministry to the homeless; we just stopped everything. Our faith was almost completely extinguished.

There was one thing that I felt I was obligated to do, and that was to call my friend and mentor in the faith, the man who had first shared the Gospel with me, and tell him I was done with the church. About six months after we had quit attending I called him. I told him that I really liked Jesus, but that the church sucked and I was done with it. In fact I was even beginning to wonder about this whole Christianity thing. He listened patiently and even sympathetically. As I was wrapping up our conversation he said to me “I am going to send you a book, if you consider me to be a friend, read it.” I gave him the standard “yeah, yeah” and promptly forgot about it.

A week later a package shows up on my doorstep. It’s a really thick hardcover book entitled ‘Book of Concord.’ Taking a quick glance through it and seeing that it was well over four hundred pages, I said to myself “yeah… right” and promptly put it on a bookshelf somewhere.

The following week my phone rang, and it was my friend checking to see if the book had arrived and if I had read it yet. I told him ‘No’ and mumbled some feeble excuse. He said ‘If you consider me a friend you will read it.’ Before I could say anything he added ‘You owe me your soul. I shared the Gospel with you; if that means anything to you, you will read it.’

Not being one to back away from a solemn charge by such a close friend, I read it.

Until this point I had heard of justification by faith alone, but never really heard a clear and biblical explanation of it. This theme is pounded home over and over again in the Lutheran Confessions, from Scripture, from the church fathers, clearly and powerfully. Finally, like the nail submitting to the last blow of the hammer, it took, I understood God’s grace in Christ, and that it’s not about what goes on inside me, but what Christ did for me.

Hope returned, and the smoldering wick of my faith started to come back to life. I am not going to lie and tell you that everything was miraculously better in my life, or that there have not been some really hard times. But, I finally see the truth about Christ’s work on my behalf and my existence here as both sinner and saint, and I am at peace with that. I have a faith that I can live with and die with.

The Confessions also answered a bunch of other important questions, helping me to understand the Scriptures as both Law and Gospel, and showing me that I serve God in fulfilling the vocations that He has given me. Basic stuff that gives me hope and the will to keep going.

My immediate question upon finishing the book was ‘Why aren’t people shouting this doctrine from the house tops?’ But that is the subject of another post sometime. It also gives you some insight as to why we started New Reformation Press.

We found a Lutheran Church and began Catechism classes in the fall of 1989. I have been a member of a Lutheran congregation ever since.

So, there is the story of how the Lutheran Confessions brought me back into the church.

If you are interested in reading them for yourself, we have the new Pocket edition at a price that won’t break the bank. For those of you who prefer a more scholarly edition we also have the Reader’s edition in a nice hardcover with helpful study notes and some cool introductory material. Both editions have a Scripture reference index that allows you to check out the pertinent passages.

Our friends at Mockingbird NYC have recently run a series of posts entitled Fathers, Sons and the Reformation, part 1 and part 2.

David Browder, the author of these posts, uses Dr. Rosenbladt’s presentation, When a Good Father Dies, Its Always Too Early, as a jumping off place for a discussion of fatherhood and the Gospel. It is a really enlightening discussion of the subject, and deeply addresses the need for men to have the approval and blessing of older men and the repercussions of this need when met and unmet. Male identity is received passively in sons, through acceptance by their fathers. Browder then draws the parallels to the Gospel and our passive reception of our identities in Christ. Great stuff.

Check out Mockingbird NYC. These guys are really good. They totally get the Gospel and their group blog is one of the most effective Christian blogs in engaging the culture that we have seen. They post videos and poetry, music and movie reviews, commentary and news, looking at it all through a very sharp and clear Gospel lens. They also have discussion groups that meet regularly throughout New York City on various books or topics. They put on an annual conference, too.

In addition to all of this they have published a couple books. You can find them on their site.

These guys have a permanent place on our blogroll. Keep an eye on them, they are up and coming. Quality work like this won’t go unnoticed and they soon will have an influential voice in the blogosphere.

Based on its popularity among Christian websites, I’ll assume that you’ve heard of biblegateway.com. If you haven’t, you’re missing out on a fantastic online Bible searching resource. They’ve got more translations available in a free Scripture search engine than most would even know about, and they make finding Scripture readings amazingly simple.

But that’s not all they do. There are other little goodies they provide there as well. In particular this time, I’d like to bring your attention to a reading program they created for 2009. If you go there and read their daily reading plan (which will take some catching up if you start now in mid-March), and continue to do so every day this year, you will have read the entirety of Scripture by the end of 2009.

And, even better, you can do it with whichever translation you prefer! Imagine that.

So, if you’re like many who have either never read all of the Bible and would like to, or have read much or all of it previously and would like to brush up again, I highly recommend you stop by and take a look. Personally, I’m now taking advantage of this program and I am extremely thankful for such a simple and robust—and FREE—online resource. I hope you enjoy it.

Recently our friend and favorite Baptist brother, Michael Spencer aka Internet Monk, had a series of his blog posts on the coming collapse of Evangelicalism edited into one article and run in the Christian Science Monitor. From there it made it onto the Drudge Report and about every Christian blog in the blogosphere. Wow, his name and article have been everywhere the last couple of days. He has been doing a whirlwind tour of interviews and receiving a flood of emails.

We here at NRP are excited to see Michael’s work getting the attention it deserves. He has a great blog and is an excellent writer. He’s a good man and we hope that his exposure will result in some more great opportunities coming his way.

If you are interested in the series of posts upon which the article was based, Michael has linked them here: http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/the-original-coming-evangelical-collapse-posts

Poke around on his blog and take in a few of his posts. Even if you disagree with him we think you will find his writing compelling.

Way to go Michael. You have worked hard and deserve the good things coming your way.

We have been busy adding new products to our catalog and we are excited to announce their arrival.

For the first time we will be offering a number of music CDs by some of our favorite artists. Adding music to our offerings has been something we have wanted to do for a while, and we have some that we think is pretty special.

http://www.newreformationpress.com/audio/

Something else that we have wanted to offer for a long time is the ‘Singing the Faith’ DVD, a history of Lutheran hymnody. If you are Protestant, and not of the Calvinist camp that sings only the Psalms in worship services, then it is also the early history of your hymnody. Learn about the purpose for which the Reformers created hymns, and how and why the very first hymnals came about. There is a lot of great music on this DVD, and the presentation is broken down into four twenty minute segments with an accompanying study guide to aid in its use for Sunday school or Bible classes. This DVD will really get you grounded in the history and development of Lutheran hymnody.

http://www.newreformationpress.com/audio/singing-the-faith.html

And finally, for your further edification, we have the Pocket Edition of the Book of Concord (The Lutheran Confessions) in stock. Now it won’t break the bank to have your own copy. Even if you aren’t Lutheran, this book is of great historical importance, and the documents contained in it are the wellspring of the Reformation. The doctrine of justification by faith alone is nowhere more clearly spelled out than it is in these writings. The reformer’s defense of this doctrine against the Roman Catholic theologians, and their historical analysis of the history of the Papacy are as brilliant and relevant today as it was in the 1500s. Everyone who holds to justification by faith alone for the sake of Christ alone, needs to read this book.

http://www.newreformationpress.com/books-printed/concordia-the-lutheran-confessions-pocket-edition.html

In the coming weeks we will be adding more music and other great products that we think you will really like, so check back periodically. Again, I can’t say how glad we are to be able to offer these fine resources to you.