From the recent sermon Jesus Loves Sinners. Here's the full sermon:

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Luke Sermon Series

The current Mars Hill sermon series traces the life of Jesus through the Gospel of Luke. Watch the preview.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! If you want to learn more about this Christian pastor and missionary, check out this biography of Patrick by Acts 29 pastor Reid Monaghan.

Acts 29 Network

A network of churches planting churches for the glory of Jesus. Get more info.

Every opportunity comes with opposition, and we must rely on God’s wisdom to proceed with any opportunity. This involves a careful examination of time and energy, which begs the question: Do you know your priorities?

Yes vs. No

Many of us wrestle with people-pleasing and a reluctance to say “no,” but sometimes it’s the only possible answer.

If you say yes to everything, you will spread yourself thin and perhaps miss truly beneficial opportunities while fulfilling less meaningful requests. You’ll see better opportunities come and go; with no margin available you’ll be trapped by foolish commitments.

On the other hand, if you don’t know your priorities you may never confidently commit to the work God’s called you to, out of fear that a better opportunity may come along. In other words, inaction and action can both be sinful.

Prepare Yourself for Action

Aligning your decision-making with a set of pre-determined priorities is critical. If your priorities aren’t defined up front, then when the opportunities come you’ll respond hastily—usually adding another plate to the pile.

“Yes” is the right decision sometimes, but how do you know? For starters, consider whether or not the opportunity compromises or enhances your priorities.

These Are Your Priorities

In its simplest form, the Christian’s priority list is:

1. Jesus
2. Spouse (if applicable)
3. Children (if applicable)
4. Ministry/Vocation

If you clarify your priorities ahead of time, you’ll be able to reject empty opportunities much faster and consider helpful opportunities more wisely. You may not do as much, but you will do it better.

Jamie Munson is the Lead Pastor of Mars Hill Church. You can connect with him on Facebook and Twitter.

Rain City Hymnal

The first offering from Re:Sound is the Rain City Hymnal. Listen online and get the record from the Re:Sound website. Find out more.

I am a servant of Christ to a foreign nation for the unspeakable glory of life everlasting which is in Jesus Christ our Lord. – Patrick

My family name was originally O’Driscoll until it was changed a few generations ago by relatives hoping to more fully assimilate into American culture after immigrating from Ireland. Though I was raised Irish Catholic, I knew virtually nothing about Saint Patrick other than the green beer, parades, shamrocks, leprechauns, and drunken Red Sox fans that celebrated in his honor every March 17th.

Technically, Saint Patrick is not even a saint, as he was never canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Additionally, Patrick was not even Irish. Rather, he was a Roman-Britain who spoke Latin and a bit of Welsh.

Patrick was born around 390 A.D. When he was roughly 16 years of age he was captured by pirates and taken to Ireland on a ship where he was sold into slavery. He spent the next six years alone in the wilderness as a shepherd for his masters’ cattle and sheep.

Isolation

Patrick was a rebellious non-Christian teenager who had come from a Christian family. His grandfather was a pastor, and his father was a deacon. However, during his extended periods of isolation without any human contact, Patrick began praying and was eventually born again into a vibrant relationship with Jesus Christ. Patrick endured the years of isolation in rain and snow by praying up to 100 prayers each day and another 100 each night.

In his early twenties God spoke to Patrick in a dream, telling him to flee from his master for a ship that was waiting for him. Amazingly, Patrick made the 200-mile journey on foot without being caught or harmed to find a ship setting sail for his home, just as God had promised. The sailors were out of food for the journey, and after Patrick prayed a herd of pigs miraculously ran toward the ship, providing a bountiful feast for the long voyage home.

God Speaks to Patrick

Upon returning home, Patrick enrolled in seminary and was eventually commissioned as a pastor. Some years later God spoke to Patrick in a dream, commanding him to return to Ireland to preach the gospel and plant churches for the pagans who lived there.

The Roman Catholic Church had given up on converting such “barbarians” deemed beyond hope. The Celtic peoples, of which the Irish were part, were an illiterate bunch of drunken, fighting, perverted pagans who basically had sex with anyone and worshiped anything. They were such a violent and lawless people, numbering anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000, that they had no city centers or national government and were spread out among some 150 warring clans. Their enemies were terrified of them because they were known to show up for battles and partake in wild orgies before running into battle naked and drunk while screaming as if they were demon-possessed. One clan was so debased that it was customary for each of their new kings to copulate with a white mare as part of his inauguration.

Unique Missionary Strategy

In faith, the forty-something year-old Patrick sold all of his possessions, including the land he had inherited from his father, to fund his missionary journey to Ireland. He worked as an itinerant preacher and paid large sums of money to various tribal chiefs to ensure he could travel safely through their lands and preach the gospel. His strategy was completely unique, and he functioned like a missionary trying to relate to the Irish people and communicate the gospel in their culture by using such things as three-leaf clovers to explain the gospel. Upon entering a pagan clan, Patrick would seek to first convert the tribal leaders and other people of influence. He would then pray for the sick, cast demons out of the possessed, preach the Bible, and use both musical and visual arts to compel people to put their faith in Jesus. If enough converts were present he would build a simple church that did not resemble ornate Roman architecture, baptize the converts, and hand over the church to a convert he had trained to be the pastor so that he could move on to repeat the process with another clan.

Patrick gave his life to the people who had enslaved him until he died at 77 years of age. He had seen untold thousands of people convert as between 30-40 of the 150 tribes had become substantially Christian. He had trained 1000 pastors, planted 700 churches, and was the first noted person in history to take a strong public stand against slavery.

Roman Opposition

Curiously, Patrick’s unorthodox ministry methods, which had brought so much fruit among the Irish, also brought much opposition from the Roman Catholic Church. Because Patrick was so far removed from Roman civilization and church polity he was seen by some as an instigator of unwelcome changes. This led to great conflicts between the Roman and Celtic Christians. The Celtic Christians had their own calendar and celebrated Easter a week earlier than their Roman counterparts. Additionally, the Roman monks shaved only the hair on the top of their head, whereas the Celtic monks shaved all of their hair except their long locks which began around the bottom of their head as a funky monk mullet. The Romans considered these and other variations by the Celtic Christian leaders to be acts of insubordination.

In the end, the Roman Church should have learned from Patrick, who is one of the greatest missionaries who has ever lived. Though Patrick’s pastors and churches looked different in method, they were very orthodox in their theology and radically committed to such things as Scripture and the Trinity. Additionally, they were some of the most gifted Christian artists the world has ever known, and their prayers and songs endure to this day around the world, including at Mars Hill where we occasionally sing the "Prayer of Saint Patrick" and the Celtic hymn "Be Thou My Vision."

For Further Study:

• At www.ccel.org there is a free copy available of Patrick’s book Confessions.
• Steve Rabey’s book In the House of Memory is a good introduction to Patrick and Celtic Christianity.
• Thomas Cahill’s book How the Irish Saved Civilization is a fascinating historical look at Patrick and the implications of Celtic Christianity on western history.
• www.ChristianityToday.com/history is the site for Christian History and Biography magazine, which is a wonderful resource that includes an entire issue on Patrick and Celtic Christianity.

Vintage Jesus:

A theological journey chasing Jesus through Scripture and pop culture. Timeless answers to timely questions about the most important man who has ever lived. Find out more.

We Belong To God’s Story

How should Christians read the news? Like non-Christians, only with a radical sense of belonging to God’s story, insofar as God himself has revealed it. In other words, there’s a huge overlap with non-Christians. We’re all created in God’s image, fallen, and sustained by God’s common grace. As Luther and Calvin said, non-Christians have a huge understanding of “things earthly,” even if they do not embrace God as he has revealed himself in his Son through the gospel. More importantly, Paul said it in Romans 1 and 2.

We have to distinguish between the Great Commandment (calling us to love God and neighbor), which is the common commission of all human beings, and the Great Commission (calling us to preach the gospel, baptize, and teach). Both are essential, but they’re really different.

Neighbors Loving Neighbors

The newspaper is a form of the law. It draws on common wisdom and data. Even its editorials reflect both the fact of God’s general revelation and its suppression in unrighteousness. Obviously, this natural law isn’t as clear as God’s revealed will in Scripture, which goes deeper in its analysis of our fallen condition. Yet when we read the newspaper, we’re neighbors loving fellow neighbors.

In this era between Christ’s two comings, God sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. If he shows his common grace toward all people and a common interest in all affairs, these issues should concern us for more than merely practical reasons. We share with non-Christians in the same joys and disappointments of temporal life.

However, the gospel isn’t announced in the newspaper. For that, we need heralds who bring the most important news of all. I won’t mention names (like Pat Robertson), but people who expect the Bible to be a special code for the meaning of the daily news (or vice versa) aren’t taking either one seriously enough.

Leaders Who Last

Too many Christian leaders stumble, burn out, or veer off track. Learn how to endure from a seasoned pastor and leadership coach in Leaders Who Last.

You can now watch the video of John Piper's sermon from a recent Resurgence event at Mars Hill Church. The event was completely sold out at Mars Hill's Ballard campus and was viewed live by an audience of over 10,000 online. Because our video player is really poor compared to Mars Hill's we've decided to send you to that site.

Be sure to select HD and fullscreen if you've got the bandwidth for it.

We've also got the video from his Sunday sermon at Mars Hill on the same weekend. You can watch it below.

New Site

We are currently working on a new site that is roughly a billion times better than what we currently have. We are so happy that we're going to be able to serve missional leaders everywhere by improving our video and audio, making our old posts easier to find, and improving the overall design.

Thank you for supporting us. Please keep telling your friends about what we're doing so that we can multiply efforts.

For more info about Re:Train, go to retrain.org.
For more John Piper, go to desiringgod.org.

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Exchange Conference

June 17-18, San Diego: A conference about identifying the Truth and the Lie of life. Learn more.

"Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory" (1 Peter 5:2-4).

Bridesmaids Put Brides First

I did a wedding recently in pouring rain where I was moved to see the gang of bridesmaids get muddy and wet in order to keep the umbrella properly covering the bride, to keep her dress out of the mud, determined to present her to her husband looking great, smelling great, and feeling great.

But occasionally I take a wedding where one of the bridesmaids has clearly missed the plot—she is more caught up with herself than with the bride. She walks down the aisle ahead of the bride and struts her stuff, with her chest out and bum swaying, checking left and right to confirm all eyes are on her.

Who Do You Resemble?

As a church leader, which of these two types of bridesmaids do you resemble? Is it more about you than the Bride, or, God forbid, more about you than the Bridegroom? Attention all church leaders: gentlemen, we have the privilege of looking after another man's wife. Take hits for her. Get bespattered for her. Get rained-on for her. Take bullets for her.

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Know Your Heretics series: Click | View Series

Historical Background

In the early 5th century a debate arose between Pelagius, a British monk, and Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. They disagreed over the relationship between human nature after the Fall and saving, divine grace in Jesus Christ.

When Pelagius arrived in Rome and saw the city’s dim view of morality, he developed a reputation for being a spiritual director who urged people to reform their behavior and live lives as upstanding, moral citizens.

Pelagius’ View of Sin

Pelagius rejected the doctrines of original sin, substitutionary atonement, and justification by faith.

Pelagius emphasized unconditional free will and the ability to better oneself spiritually without grace. This was in direct contrast to Augustine, who believed that humanity was completely helpless in Adam’s sin and in desperate need of grace. Specifically, Pelagius took issue with Augustine’s prayer in his Confessions, which asked God to grant humans grace to act in accordance with his divine commands: “Grant what you command and command what you will.”
(Confessions, X. 40).

Pelagius rejected the teaching of “original sin,” the results of the Fall upon humanity. According to him, Adam’s sin in no way made humans corrupt, but instead “over the years our sin gradually corrupts us, building an addiction and then holding us bound with what seems like the force of nature itself.” (Letter to Demetrias, VIII). Humans by nature have a clean slate, and it is only through voluntary sin that humans are made wicked. Potentially, then, one could live a sinless life and merit heaven.

Pelagius thought that God commanding a person to do something that he lacked the ability to do would be useless: “To call a person to something he considers impossible does him no good.” (Letter to Demetrias, I). If God called humans to live moral lives, Pelagius thought, it should be within their power to carry out such commands.

Orthodox Response

Pelagius’ error was deemed heretical in 416 by the Council of Carthage. Originally Adam, Augustine said, possessed freedom—the ability not to sin. After the Fall, all human beings participate in Adam’s sin, which renders them not able not to sin. After the mediation of divine grace in Jesus Christ humans are once again given the ability not to sin.

Augustine replied to Pelagius’ views in two treatises: On the Grace of Christ and On Original Sin. Augustine writes: “We must realize that Pelagius believes that neither our will nor our action is helped by divine aid…he believes that God does not help us to will, that he does not help us to act, that he helps us only to be able to will and to act.”(On the Grace of Christ, V.6).

Augustine saw Pelagius’ teaching to be a clear denial of Philippians 2:12-13, because Pelagius located the capacity “to will and to do” what pleases God in human nature rather than in God’s grace.”(On the Grace of Christ, V.6 and VI.7).

Why Does All This Matter?

Ignoring the consequences the Fall has on everyone leads to a diminishment of the multifaceted work of Christ. In his ministry Jesus not only bore our sins on the cross, but lived a perfect life in obedience to the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit—the life that Adam failed to live—in order to restore fallen humans to their original state of grace.

It is not only through the grace of God that humans are initially saved but also through this grace that they are sustained. As Augustine put it, God “guards the weak so that by his gift the saints unfailingly choose the good and unfailingly refuse to abandon it.”(On Rebuke and Grace, 38).

Without understanding the magnitude of sin and the plight of humanity, the gracious work of Jesus for us and our salvation seems superfluous. 1 Peter 1:18-19 says: “You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ.”

Because of sin, humans are not naturally good—that's why we need Jesus.

Mars Hill Music

Stream the latest music from Mars Hill bands in the Mars Hill music library.

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Michael Horton says that “evangelicalism is out-liberaling liberalism.” In this clip, he explains why, and what we should learn from the mistakes and successes of mainline denominations.

In this interview series, Mars Hill PR Director Nick Bogardus interviews Dr. Michael Horton. For more information and resources from Dr. Horton, check out White Horse Inn.

How Jesus Made Disciples

Resurgence Director Mike Anderson shares reflections from the book of John on How Jesus Made Disciples.

We're getting ready for one of the most unique and engaging conferences we've ever done. The Exchange conference will take place in San Diego June 17-18.

Speakers

Mark Driscoll
Peter Jones
Francis Chan
Kevin DeYoung
and more (full list here)

How you can help:

• Tell your friends in the area on Facebook or email
• Sign up to get postcards and flyers to hand out at a Southern California church
• Download this PowerPoint slide to help promote the event at your church

Exchange Conference

June 17-18, San Diego: A conference about identifying the Truth and the Lie of life. Learn more.