scot – these talks are so great. thanks for sharing them with us…

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks! These are great.

Scot,
Gail and I listened to the first of these talks this morning. It is excellent! I teach that salvation involves the restoration of the image in all four of the dimensions about which you speak but I’ve never really taken this truth back to definition of the gospel we proclaim. Your point that we reap in the church (or its absence) what we sow in the gospel we declare is profound and sounds very right.
The ironic thing is that I preached a sermon in our church’s missionary conference just last year, in which I described the church’s mission in terms of the restoration of God’s shalom, as we see it fulfilled in the new earth at the end of Revelation. My point was that our mission is to work toward the realization of that utopia in all the ways that we can. We recognize that it will only come when God creates it through his radical consummation of salvation, but in the meantime, when we pray (and work) for God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, it is that vision of how God wants the world to be that identifies what we are working towards. It is peculiar that I have never taken this truth back into its implications for the gospel we preach. That I must correct, so I thank you for setting me straight.
I owe to Philip Edcumbe Hughes’ The True Image: The Origin and Destiny of Man in Christ my realization that Jesus is the prototype after which Adam and Eve were created. You spelled out very nicely that Christological anthropology. But you did even better by putting the restoration of the broken image into its context within the people of God in Christ, so that the church becomes central to the gospel. Very nicely done.
Thank you, brother.
Terry

Terry,
Kind of you to write as you did.
I, too, read Hughes but when I got round to him I think I had already made that connection with Christ as the true image. But, that’s a good book.
On shalom, I need to develop that some in my own thinking — my understanding of “world” as the 4th direction of gospel healing definitely could be reshaped by shalom and it would do better than “world” since I tend to gravitate toward ecology and I don’t mean to limit it to that at all. Time or space often cramps the point and for some reason I leave the meaning of world hanging — it is what “strength” means in Deut 6:4-5 and by that it means all of our resources and all of that which we touch and influence. So, shalom is the better idea. Thanks.

Scot,
What a great comment about the meaning of “strength.” I hadn’t unpacked that adequately in my own reading of the text, so you have filled it out very nicely for me.
Speaking of that text, I was intrigued by Stephen Covey’s appeal to it as descriptive of what we need, in order to flourish – to live (soul), to love (heart), to learn (mind), to leave a legacy (strength). I wasn’t impressed that he had understood the Hebrew terms properly but he did have some good applications of biblical truth, even if not quite that biblical text. I had read his book shortly before my Dad died (at 90) and so it was in my mind when I was called upon on to say something at his funeral. I was able to say very sincerely that I knew no one else who had spent his life more vigorously living for God, loving God and neighbour, learning, and leaving an eternal legacy.
Blessings,
Terry