In Sunday’s sermon, “Jesus’ Plan for Your Growth,” Ryan unpacked Ephesians 4:1-16, one of the New Testament’s most intricate and beautiful passages on the nature of the church and its growth. Verses 1-3, which concern our shared calling and attitude together, reach into every one of our relationships with rich application:

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

To help all of us better reflect this spirit, Ryan mentioned a book by Sam Crabtree, titled, Practicing Affirmation: God-Centered Praise to Those Who Are Not God. The book is about exactly what it sounds like: using our words to affirm the good we see in others. This is an important book for the home, for the work place, and certainly for the church.

Here are some helpful quotes to whet your appetite:

“God is glorified in us when we affirm the work he has done and is doing in others.”

“To fail to commend the character of Christ in people is to fall into the same lackluster indifference of a person who never exclaims what a beautiful morning it is, thereby robbing the Creator of glory he deserves for making that sky, that volcano, that character.”

“Good affirmations are God-centered, pointing to the image of God in a person.”

“When our mouths are empty of praise for others, it is probably because our hearts are full of love for self.”

“The affirmation ratio is at work, even when your rationale for making the corrections you are making is completely justified. The dynamics in play don’t go away just because you have taken the right position on the issue.”

“We must leave room in our thinking for the possibility of being pleased with someone, yet without being satisfied entirely.”

“Salvation will not happen in the absence of preaching, but salvation is not guaranteed in the presence of preaching. Similarly, affirming people will save no one. But lack of affirmation may bring hindrances and obstacles into play,making it less likely that they will give the gospel a hearing, especially when the good news comes from someone who is predominantly bad news.”

“It was a sandwich all right, and he boasted about his method, but his employees began to call it the baloney sandwich. Let affirmations stand alone, separated from correction.”

“It seems easier to practice affirmation early in relationships, and it can get harder later. Have you ever noticed in a restaurant that some couples are talkative and some are not? What happened? Generally, new relationships are still predominately affirming, but as relationships endure the years, they also endure a lot of correction. More specifically, affirmation didn’t keep up. Not enough affirmation was dished out compared with all the other.”

“This is where we get in trouble: affirmations tend to evaporate over time. Meanwhile, corrections keep piling up. Corrections tend to out-number affirmations, and by doing so, corrections sabotage or undercut the value of affirmations.”

“The absence of affirmation for God’s handiwork in his people is also a kind of sacrilege . . . It is disobedience to God’s command: ‘A woman who fears the Lord is to be praised’ (Prov. 31:30).”

“A fire not stoked goes out. A refrigerator unplugged rots the eggs, which were perfectly good not too long ago.A garden not tended erupts with weeds,not vegetables. Affirmation is the fire-stoking,refrigerator-electrifying, garden-tending side of relationships.”

Buy Practicing Affirmation online here, or pick up or order a copy at our newly revamped Resource Center starting Sunday, September 16.

Every last Wednesday of the month, we share in the Lord’s Supper together as a church. Here is a reflection from J.I. Packer on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper for our communion with God, our assurance, and our fellowship with one another.

I don’t think we can ever say too much about the importance of an active exercise of mind and heart at the communion service. . . .

Holy Communion demands us of private preparation of heart before the Lord before we come to the table. We need to prepare ourselves for fellowship with Jesus Christ the Lord, who meets us in this ceremony. We should think of him both as the host of the communion table and as enthroned on the true Mount Zion referred to in Hebrews 12, the city of the living God where the glorified saints and the angels are.

The Lord from his throne catches us up by his Spirit and brings us into fellowship with himself there in glory. He certainly comes down to meet us here, but he then catches us up into fellowship with him and the great host of others who are eternally worshipping him there.

We are also to learn the divinely intended discipline of drawing assurance from the sacrament. We should be saying in our hearts, ‘as sure as I see and touch and taste this bread and this wine, so sure it is that Jesus Christ is not a fancy but a fact, that he is for real, and that he offers himself to be my Saviour, my Bread of Life, and my Guide to glory. He has left me this rite, this gesture, this token, this ritual action as a guarantee of this grace; He instituted it, and it is a sign of life-giving union with him, and I’m taking part in it, and thus I know that I am his and he is mine forever.’ That is the assurance that we should be drawing from our sharing in the Lord’s Supper every time we come to the table.

And then we must realize something of our togetherness in Christ with the rest of the congregation. . . . [We should reject the] strange perverse idea . . . that the Lord’s Supper is a flight of the alone to the Alone: it is my communion I come to make, not our communion in which I come to share. You can’t imagine a more radical denial of the Gospel than that.

The communion table must bring to us a deeper realization of our fellowship together. If I go into a church for a communion service where not too many folk are present, to me it is a matter of conscience to sit beside someone. This togetherness is part of what is involved in sharing in eucharistic worship in a way that edifies.

—J. I. Packer, “The Gospel and the Lord’s Supper,” in Serving the People of God, vol. 2 of Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 49-50.

We meet for this month’s Lord’s Supper service tonight at 6:30 PM. If your schedule has hindered you from joining us for our Wednesday Lord’s Supper services, next month we will share in the Lord’s Supper together in both services on Sunday morning, September 30.

HT: Justin Taylor

Have you ever said to yourself, “Our church should have a program for that!”? Or maybe, “Our church has too many programs!”

Hebrews 10:24-25 gives us an important command: “let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” This command and others like it mean that we should make plans to be together. Yet programs aren’t ministry, and there are good reasons to guard against over-programming.

In this video from The Gospel Coalition Blog, Ryan Kelly interviews Ray Ortlund and Darrin Patrick about the dangers of over-programming in the church.

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This fall, our Community Groups are going through a study called, What Did You Expect: Fighting Sin and It’s Effects on Relationships.

Now, if you’ve hung around DSC long enough, you probably recognize the title of that study. That’s because it is based on a book by Paul Tripp, titled, What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage.

If you’ve read this or heard someone talk about it, you’ll know that it’s not just a book about marriage. It’s really a book about God, our relationships, our sin, and the gospel – all applied to marriage, that one relationship where these things converge in force. But the same heart machinery that is involved in the trouble and glory of our marriages is the same machinery that is at play in any and all of our relationships.

That’s why our Community Group studies will be based on Paul Tripp’s material throughout the fall season.

Here’s a video introduction to Paul Tripp’s book, What Did You Expect?:

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If you aren’t in a Community Group yet, there are a few ways to get plugged in. You can ask a friend at DSC if they’d welcome you to join theirs. The answer is, yes! You can express interest through the Communication Card on Sunday morning. Or, you can email community@desertspringschurch.org with your interest. Visit the Community Group page to learn more about Community Groups and about this fall’s study.

If you’ve been around DSC for a while now, you may have heard Ryan address the subject of depression. Of course, there are different kinds of depression, but one often neglected kind of sadness for Christians comes from what could be called, spiritual desertion.

Last week, John Starke posted audio to an interview with Ryan about this subject over at The Gospel Coalition Blog. Here’s the introduction with a link to the interview:

We regularly pray personally and corporately for God to increase the sense of his presence among his people. But what happens when it feels like God has withdrawn his presence? What introspective questions should we ask? What prayers should we pray?

Ryan Kelly, pastor of preaching at Desert Springs Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Council member for The Gospel Coalition, talks with Mark Mellinger about the doctrine of desertion. He describes how this doctrine helps us make sense of the psalms and our experience of spiritual dryness. Kelly reflects on a scary time in his life and directs us to Puritan writing on this topic, since so few modern writers address desertion directly.

Click here to download Ryan’s interview with Mark Mellinger.

If the subject of depression and spiritual desertion is of interest to you, you may find several links helpful. This past spring, Ryan preached two sermons on depression from Psalm 42 and 43, “How to Really Talk to Yourself,” and, “Unpacking Depression: Why Are You Downcast?.” In follow up to these sermons, we posted two blogs, including links to books, articles, and other resources helpful for understanding this subject: “Resources for Depression and Spiritual Desertion,” and, “Why Are You Downcast, O My Soul?” Unpacking Depression.”

Then, back in 2006, Ryan conducted a Saturday Seminar on depression that explored the Bible’s teaching on how we should understand and address depression as Christians.