There's a missing word in the political debate over abortion. See, the “pro-choice” crowd almost always phrases the thing they're defending as “a woman's right to choose.” But there's a problem.
As an aspiring writer, I feel compelled to point out that “choose” is a transitive verb. That is, the way should be phrased, to be grammatically correct, is “a woman's right to choose X,” where X is some object. Whenever you hear that phrase, always ask, “a woman's right to choose what?”
“There is no message in the New Testament for the lost except to tell them that they are lost, that they are under condemnation, that they are under the wrath of God, and that unless they repent they remain lost and will be lost to all eternity. This is what I want to emphasize, that the New Testament has nothing to say to the world this morning except that — nothing whatsoever. Our only message to those who are in the world is to repent and to believe the Gospel — nothing else. There is no further interest taken.
“If a man does not repent and believe the Gospel, well he remains where he is, and the Gospel has nothing further to say to him. There is no hope for the world outside Christ — none whatsoever. There is no improvement predicted or prophesied for the world — none whatsoever.
“There is no greater error or heresy than to think that it is the business of Christian preaching to improve the world somewhat. It's a denial of the Gospel. I am using my language advisedly and soberly. The idea that it is the business of the church to recommend Christian principles to the world and plead with it and ask it to put [them] into practice, to send messages to statesmen and ask them to put [them] into practice, I say, is a denial of [the Gospel].
“The only message of the Gospel to the world is to tell it to repent because it's under the wrath of God, and that unless it repents it's lost, and lost eternally.”
— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“Friend, if your kind of Christianity makes sense even if there's nothing after the grave, then you've gotten hold of a false product. The kind of Christianity that the Bible talks about and that we are calling you to will not all add up to necessarily what's considered a better life on this side of the grave. Because we believe in those eternal realities, and we live for them for Christ, so it is that we Christians are happy under any circumstances in this world — as Habbakuk said, even if our resources are entirely spent — as long as we have God, because God is our strength and our hope.”
— Mark Dever
How do I know when I have worshipped? Is it when I have had some kind of emotional or visceral response? Is it when I have performed certain actions or cried a certain number of tears?
I think both of these answers, the emotional and the mechanistic, are wrong and for the same reason: They are both about me.
Years ago, I was participating in a celebration of the Lord's Supper. (For all you Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Reformed folks, I'm a Zwinglian in this. If you're a Southern Baptist, it means that I almost certainly believe the same as you about what's going on. But I digress.) At that particular time, I was deeply moved by the service: Meditating on my sin and on the greatness of my Savior. But the next time our church celebrated the Supper, I tried to get the feeling back.
When I was in college (the first time, for those who are keeping track of these things), I did what every underclassman had to do: I took a course in basic psychology. One of the things the book talked about was the lengths to which people will go to capture a feeling they called Nirvana. One of the examples they gave was actually of Roman Catholics celebrating mass. Now, I don't think the authors were talking about the Hindu Nirvana in the theological sense, but only about an emotional sensation.
The authors of the psychology text (No, I don't remember who they were — it was thirty years ago. Deal.) were starting with the assumption that there was nothing there, and that the external observer had a truer idea about what was going on than the participants. (As a response to that, you should try to find C.S. Lewis's little essay, "Meditation in a Toolshed.")
And I realized that was exactly what I was doing, even with my Evangelical belief in what's going on in the Lord's Supper: I was trying to capture an emotional sensation.
It was a sin.
It was a sin because it was about me and what I was feeling and about my response to the message and the ceremony.
So I started thinking about worship and what we go through to "get there," to know we have worshipped. And I wondered if it didn't amount to the same thing.
As Christians, however, we believe there is something there, that it is independent of us, and that something is really going on in the Supper. Where can we go to find out what it is? How about 1 Corinthians 11:23-26:
For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
People from various traditions will interpret this in different ways, but the apostle's final statement is something we can all agree on: The Lord's Supper is a proclamation of the Gospel, a declaration that there is forgiveness of sins and of the way forgiveness was procured, and all those who trust in that forgiveness have it.
Whew.
I brought all that up, not as a thing to talk about (though it's a great subject), but as an example of worship. In particular, when I celebrate the Lord's supper, it's not about me and my feelings, not about me and my response, but about Jesus and His forgiveness.
I claim that this principle holds for all worship: It's not about me and my feelings; it's not about me and my response. It's about Jesus and His forgiveness. I have worshipped when, as a believer, I have proclaimed the Gospel.
At Pyromaniacs (linked on the right), Phil Johnson was writing about a particular individual who had seemingly become apostate (fallen away from the faith). He followed that with some general comments about folks who've done this, and in those, this was number five:
A disproportionate number of apostates seem to come from the kind of über-rigid fundamentalist backgrounds where what you do seems to be given ultimacy over what you believe. That kind of stress on externals naturally cultivates Pharisaism rather than authentic faith, so we shouldn't be surprised at the high percentage of apostates such a system produces.
I wonder if that applies equally to the popular preacher who said, "We need a new reformation of deeds, not creeds."
The hardest thing about the hymn verse below is the word “Ebenezer”. That word comes from I Samuel 7:12. In that chapter, the people of Israel came together and repented, and while they were together — well, here, read it for yourself:
As Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to attack Israel. But the Lord thundered with a mighty sound that day against the Philistines, and threw them into confusion, and they were routed before Israel. And the men of Israel went out from Mizpah and pursued the Philistines and struck them, as far as below Beth-car.
Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen, and called its name Ebenezer, for he said, “Till now, the Lord has helped us.”
So “Ebenezer” means “stone of help” and it refers to a particular memorial set up to help the people remember that the Lord has helped them, and he is the source of all their help. (For a closely related reference, see Psalm 121.)
Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I've come,
And I hope by Thy good pleasure safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger wand'ring from the fold of God.
He to rescue me from danger interposed his precious blood.
I have heard it said that death for a Christian (and for those who love him/her) should not be a sad occasion, but a happy time of homecoming. I can appreciate the contrast with suffering this represents — especially if the suffering is concentrated around the time of death. The relief of the suffering of a loved one and the burden of care for the family can be great.
But when Jesus stood at the tomb of Lazarus, John's Gospel tells us that He was “troubled in Spirit.” Francis Schaeffer wrote (I have forgotten which book I read it in; sorry) that in the Greek, it is plain that Jesus was angry, not just about his friend dying, but about death itself. I wonder how this should color our view of death.
When I was considering beginning blogging, but before I chose the (in my opinion) whimsical name and theme now found here, I very nearly settled on the name Verge of Jordan, based on this verse of the old hymn, “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah.” The point was that because life in this world is short — especially compared to eternity — we are all on the “verge of Jordan,” i.e., near death, and all our actions, all our words, all our thoughts, all our desires, when rightly oriented in this life, always have eternity in view.
As it stands, what this verse expresses is reliance through Jesus on our Heavenly Father's grace and mercy to see us through this life.
When I tread the verge of Jordan,
Bid my anxious fears subside;
Death of deaths, and hell’s destruction,
Land me safe on Canaan’s side.
Songs of praises, songs of praises,
I will ever give to Thee;
I will ever give to Thee.
At the beginning of [the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25] the sheep and the goats are separated by what they are, and only Christ can take a goat and turn that person into a sheep. We don't have the ability to change ourselves from goats into sheep, and the transformation takes place when Christ gives us faith through the proclamation of the Gospel. So salvation is a gift from beginning to end. The sheep aren't even aware of the good works that they have done.
— Chris Rosebrough
One of the problems we see, even in our churches, is people pursuing spirituality without Jesus. This is entirely backward. We should pursue Jesus and whatever spirituality follows will be enough.
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
in thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail;
thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.
I have downloaded and listened to (most of) the audio listed below. It's all in MP3 format, so if you live close by me, let me know and I can loan you a copy on a USB “thumb drive” that you can copy to your computer, and from there to your iPod or other device, or even burn onto a CD. Note: These were all given away by their various sources (church, conference, whatever), so there is no copyright issue with my giving them away to you.
By the time you have asked for it, there may be additional resources on the thumb drive. If it's there, you can copy it!
Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from God and acceptance by God through obedience to God.
— C.J. Mahaney
In my roaming around the internet for lo! these several years, I have, at times, strayed out of the Southern Baptist fields and found things. One of the things I have found is advice on how to evaluate a sermon. So below are two different methods.
First from a Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod pastor comes his three step evaluation criteria. Apply the steps in this order:
The point is that the content of the sermon should be that the Gospel is what Jesus did, not what we do.
The second, one-step, criterion comes from a Methodist bishop. His is probably logically equivalent to the Lutheran's, but is a great deal more succinct. It goes like this:
“Christianity is not a religion, it's a relationship.” How many times have you heard that? Besides having a dubious perspective on James 1:26-27, this statement is demonstrably incomplete. Every sentient being in the universe has a relationship with every other sentient being in the universe. If nothing else, they have a relationship called “strangers.”
But when someone says some variant of what I quoted above, they mean a human has a relationship with God through the finished work of Christ. Abraham, though he didn't know Jesus by name, had the promise of God concerning his “Seed”, and in believing God, he was called a friend of God. That was their relationship.
But friendship isn't the only relationship people can have with God: “Creation” is an action by a Creator that establishes a relationship between a Creator with some other being.
“But,” you're protesting, “I mean a personal relationship, not an object relationship.” Fair enough. You may not believe it, but the Bible declares that every human, lost or saved, has a relationship with God. You probably agree that saved people have a relationship of love, as child to Father, as slave to Redeemer, as lost to Finder (see Luke 15).
But I'm guessing you don't think about the relationship of the lost to the Father, Son and Spirit. But they have one. The Bible's word for this relationship is "enmity," the relationship between enemies.
The lost are enemies of Jesus Christ. When stated that way, it's a bit of a shock. But it has the benefit of being true.
So how can anyone be saved? People can be saved because God loves his enemies.
Before you read The Shack, watch this.
Updated May 21, 2008
And read this. Here's a quote to whet your appetite:
The way to avoid being [someone who claims to love God, but whose life shows little evidence of the transformation] is not to avoid theology, but to love and to embrace and to pursue it. Those men and women who live most like Christ are not the ones who know the least about Him, but the ones who know Him best. We wish to be Christians who know God deeply and intimately. And to know Him in that way we turn first to the Bible.
Before the Civil War, before his presidency, Abraham Lincoln was known to be a scoffer toward Christianity. I have read elsewhere that when Lincoln went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to deliver his most famous address, his commitment to Christ was cemented. It was about the time he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, over a year before the Gettysburg Address, that a change began to come over him. Below is a brief meditation by Lincoln, written around the time of the Proclamation. I am posting it here because it reveals a maturity in thinking about the will of God that is rarely heard.
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
Phil Johnson (from now on, I'll call him Phil), Pyromaniac, has completed a blog series on “contextualization.” To read what I'm talking about so this makes some kind of sense, go here and start reading from the bottom for the first post; to read the comment threads click on the dates; to comment on Pyromaniacs you have to have a Blogger/Google login (but you can read the blog and the comments without registering and you can comment here without registering, though it would be kind if you did so).
I want to comment on the series and its motivations and its implications. I waited until the series was complete before starting — it wasn't intentional, but it turned out to be better, since I've now followed Phil's entire train of thought.
There is an interesting difference between the text of the series proper and the comment threads — including Phil's own comments — that ensued. Please understand that I do not believe for a second Phil has any personal animosity in this; his concern is and ever was for the Gospel.
Analysis
Evaluation:Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in. For all of Phil's protest over “contextualize” as a word (along with its conjugates), he continues to use words like “charity” in an in-house manner that won't be understood by those who only think of “charity” in terms the IRS will understand.
Evaluation: There's no problem with that statement as such. There are, however, two questions we must frequently ask ourselves:
To ask these questions at once and in an operational and slightly more provocative, way: How has the offense ceased to be the Gospel and started being merely the Christian culture?
And, to drive on to the next logical question, what does this say about our attitude about the sufficiency of Scripture?
Thoughts, anyone?
Go read this. Just to whet your appetite, here's the ending. But to see what he's saying, read the whole thing.
Where anything other than Christ is preached, there is no truth, and there is no freedom. There may be shouts of affirmation or silently nodding heads in response, there may be left-wing politics or right-wing politics, there may be culturally liberal psychotherapy or culturally conservative psychotherapy, but there's nothing but judgment in the air.
Then come back here and comment.
This quote comes from someone you don't want to be associated with, one of the proponents of “post-liberal” theology. Here he is offering a critique of the way modern Evangelicals think about the Cross of Christ. I have inserted some expanatory notes in [brackets].
Our increasingly feel-good therapeutic culture is antithetical to talk of the Cross, and our consumerist society has made the doctrine a pariah. A more puzzling feature of this development as it has affected professedly confessional churches is the silence that has surrounded it. There have been few audible protests. Even most contemporary theologies of the Cross fit the pattern of Jesus as model. But justification itself is rarely described in accordance with the Reformation pattern, even by conservative Evangelicals. Most of them are conversionists holding to Arminian versions of the ordo salutis [the order of events in the salvation of an individual], which are further removed from Reformation theology than was the [Roman Catholic] Council of Trent. Therefore, where the Cross once stood is now a vacuum.— George Lindbeck
About the Council of Trent: Follow the link, then look at the Canons (laws) that follow the heading “ON JUSTIFICATION” about two-thirds of the way down, starting between the markers [Page 44] and [Page 45]. Pay special attention to Canons IX, XI, XII, XXIV, and XXV (that's 9, 11, 12, 24, and 25 in English). If you agree with what these canons say, go make your confession to a priest, because you are already functioning as a Roman Catholic.
Okay here's a quote that's too long to be one of my email signatures. Enjoy and comment:
Our polity, that is, how we structure making decisions, whose authority we recognize, reflects our theology. If you have a higher view, a deeper view, of the falleness of man, you will tend to want more diffusion of authority. You will not trust authority being so concentrated in the hands of a sinner, regardless of whose parents that sinner may be, or how rich or educated that sinner may be. On the other hand, if you tend to have a lower view of the depravity, don't think the fall affected mankind that badly, think people are basically kind of good, you'll probably feel more more comfortable with power being more concentrated in peoples' hands, believing that they can do better. You see this in politics; you also see it in the Church.— Mark Dever
I'm finally getting around to replying to your email from September. I'm truly sorry for the delay. Here're some random thought about what you wrote, guaranteed to be out of order. BTW, for those of us who still check your blog every day (!), this would have been good fodder in that trough.
- The degree to which I consider the Gospel to be good news is directly proportional to my perception that I am a sinner justly condemned by a holy God.
- The notion that what Jesus focused on was “loving others and changing lives” seems odd when you read more of the Sermon on the Mount than the Beatitudes. The most frightening words in the whole New Testament are in Matthew 7. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, Jesus said most of the hard stuff, and Paul said most of the comforting stuff. Somehow we've gotten it backwards ...
- The notion that the Gospels and the Epistles can or should be set in opposition to each other is hard to believe when you read all of either.
- Setting “changed lives” above “knowledge” really means the Law (usually a weakened, non-crushing version of the Law) has become more important than the Gospel of free forgiveness. Setting “knowledge” above “changed lives” is just making an excuse for being puffed up (at best) or neo-gnosticism (at worst).
- The problem with the preaching of justification isn't that it is done too much (vis-a-vis life-changing), it's that it's done badly. “Life-changing” messages just give me something to do, and all too frequently, they tell me it is actually possible to do it. Everything God requires of us is impossible for us to accomplish.
- When we do accomplish something good, it's like this story (which is told by the son as true): There was a father who did all his own work on his car, and never took it to the shop. Mike, his son, was a klutz. But the dad loved Mike, and once when the dad was just finishing up, he called Mike over. The wrench was already sitting on the nut, and the dad told him, “Turn that wrench a quarter turn clockwise.” The son did so, then they packed up the tools and went inside, where the dad told the mom, “Mike fixed the car.”
- I wonder what proportion of Christ's teaching was actually about “love and forgiveness”. Has anyone actually compiled the real data on this? Surely John 6, for example, leans toward doctrine rather than practice.
- In the end, both the “meaters” (doctrine) and the “milkers” (love and forgiveness) have the wrong goal: They are both trying to pick and choose from the Bible what they're interested in rather than learning from the Scriptures (the “apostles' teaching” from Acts 2:42) what is there, in the proportion it is there, and in the order it is there. (BTW, trying to achieve “balance”, whatever the heck that is, is another way of picking and choosing. Working through the Bible passage by passage is the only way I know of to avoid hobby-horsing around.)
- Finally (can you believe I'm gonna stop?), there are ways in which we can never be Christ-like. Here's a partial list, all obvious things, but when we talk about being Christ-like we must never forget them.
- We are not the creators of the universe.
- We do not have as our mission dying for the sins of the world.
- We are not sinless. If we are honest, we are the exact opposite. (Added March 28, 2008) In fact, we are the exact opposite even if we aren't honest.
This blog is named after a silly sign my (unidentified) employer has installed. (Photography is not allowed in the facility, so the image you see in the header is a mock up, not a photograph. Rats.) The wording so ridiculous because without knowing the context it is impossible to tell what it means.
These questions — and this sign — have no real bearing on this blog. This is not, for example, a Dilbertesque blog of the foolishness of corporate America. (We have newspapers for that.)
What I intend to do here is post some (short) things I have written and open them up for comment to friends and other interested parties. I will also (probably weekly) post a quote from someone for open comment. All are welcome, though I will read comments and delete any with inappropriate content.
Oh, I almost forgot: If I'm not talking about corporate foolishness, what is the subject? Most anything in Christianity — theology, practice, foibles and kudos — will eventually be included if the Lord tarries. But I'm not in any hurry to cover everything. Once in a while, I may talk about politics, but I don't plan for it to be often.
