Some years ago I bought a book by Jerry Bridges entitled, “The Discipline of Grace.” What stuck in my mind in that book was the chapter or chapters where he discussed seven points which he learned from Romans 3:19-26. He called this passage as the “gospel in a nutshell.” I made it into a sermon and I shared it to some local congregations years ago where I was once served.
Yesterday, I was requested to preach and I decided to share this message again with the ReThink Community, my home church at this time, a local congregation of Grace Communion International in Santa Rosa, Laguna. Here’s the video of that message:
For this session, we began with the two parts of a video by Dr. Gary Deddo entitled, “GCI Doctrines and How to Teach Them.” This is a more recent video than the one I showed last time which was a video in the year 2010 during the GCI international conference in Orlando, Florida.
After that we returned to the materials provided in the “40 Days of Discipleship” — a self-paced discipleship program. We discussed the article, “Strong Theology vs. Weak Theology,” an article by Dr. Joseph Tkach. Various issues and/or questions came out along the way as we discussed the subject matter on the value of having a strong theology compared to a weak theology. The videos also generated questions about the early creeds: Apostles Creed, Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. It would be a good idea to get an understanding about these creeds.
Since some are interested to follow us, here is the video for that evening last Wednesday:
Last Sunday, March 12, it was my first time to preach at the local congregation of Grace Communion International (GCI) in Calamba, Laguna — the birthplace of our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal. This small group of brethren was recently declared as a new local congregation of GCI in the area. I was happy to have been invited in such a historic place for the first time to share the good news of Jesus Christ.
I shared with the brethren the wonderful good news that Christ’s incarnation has implicated all of us in such a way that when he died, we all died with him. When he ascended up to heaven, we were brought up along with him into the heavenly realms as Paul said in Ephesians 2:6. He not only died for us. He also lived for us. We live yet not us, but Christ lives in us and for us as our Substitute and Representative. He assumed all of us. He took all of us with him.
When Christ became flesh, there was a union of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. Theologians call it as the hypostatic union. We got implicated and included in Christ. His righteousness became our righteousness. He became sin for us.
For this fourth session we have finally begun to use “Day 1” of the 40 Days of Discipleship which is a discipleship class material provided by my denomination, the Grace Communion International. We were supposed to discuss two articles namely: “Why Bother with Theology” and “Strong Theology vs. Weak Theology” all written by Dr. Joseph Tkach. But as it turned out, we had a good discussion among us and we only were able to touch the first article. We will discuss the next article for next meeting.
I also presented to the group a short 5-minute videoclip from a video of Dr. Gary Deddo in the year 2010 discussing what the purpose of doctrine is and the “what and why” of theology. I had this posted on YouTube a few years ago. Here it is below:
Just very recently, Dr. Gary Deddo gave a lecture on “GCI Doctrines and How to Teach Them.” It is all available for viewing at Youtube at this link.
From what I can gather, the group seems interested to continue with this class. I am also encouraged that there are some who are interested to watch the video of the class and even suggested that I also provide an audio version (mp3) of the class. Here then is the video of this session:
And here is the link to the audio version of this session in mp3 format. Please click this link.
We had our discipleship class for the third time last Wednesday, March 1 and our topic was on the importance of “Reading the Bible with a Christ-centered Lens. ” We watched a video interview of Jeff McSwain by Dr. Mike Feazell after which we gave our thoughts, impressions and what we have learned about the topic.
Before the video, I first began to share my blog on “How to Study the Bible.” I explained that essentially, there are two tasks involved in studying the Bible (or doing Hermeneutics). The first task is to get the facts and the second is on the application of the facts to our modern situation. Please visit the link for more on this one.
I also discussed with the group the importance of understanding “Figurative Language in the Bible.” I wrote about this topic here in my blog site. Please click the link if you want to know more about this subject. This topic was also explained by Dr. Mike Feazell in his book, The Liberation of the Worldwide Church of God which was published in 2001.
With these two articles, we will begin using the 40 Days of Discipleship, a discipleship material provided for free by my denomination which is “a self-paced doctrinal instruction plan.” Since we will only meet once a week, we will see how it goes and maybe add some more reading assignments per week.
For the benefit of those who are following us online, here’s a video recording of that third session:
