Respect life

Here is the outline of the lesson for 2014-01-19, Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. It’s based on Psalm 139. As I told the class, even if you aren’t thinking about the topic of this lesson, it would be a blessing to your soul to memorize this Psalm. Even though I forgot the outline (I left it on the printer at home), I managed to remember most of it. I got a little preachy toward the end …

Read

• 139:1–6
• 139:7–12
• 139:13–18
• 139:19–24

The basic outline of the psalm

• God knows me. (1–6)
  • ASK Who does God know to this level of detail? (everyone)
• I can’t escape from him. (7–12)
  • ASK Who can find a place where God can’t reach him? (no one)
• He knows every detail of how I was made, down to the molecule. (13–18)
  • ASK How much does God know about everyone? (everything)
• I hate God’s enemies, but what if I am one of them? (19–24)
  • ASK Why should I be merciful to those who hate God?
    • because to some extent, I am one of them
    • God may lead them to repent and trust in Christ

Implications

• The focus is on the 3rd section (13–18).
• If God knows how I am made, and he made me that way on purpose, what should my attitude be toward how I am made? (respect for life as made by God)
  • What about characteristics that can be corrected by surgery? (cleft lip/palatte?)
• We should have the same attitude about everyone God has made.
• What about those who don’t share our attitude?
  • Pro-choice?
  • Pro-euthenasia
    • The Liverpool Care Pathway was developed by Royal Liverpool University Hospital and Liverpool’s Marie Curie Hospice in the late 1990s for the care of terminally ill cancer patients. Since then the scope of the LCP has been extended to include all patients deemed dying.
    • In 2012, it was revealed that just over half of the total of NHS trusts had received or were due to receive financial rewards to hit targets associated with the use of the care pathway.[1] These payments are made under a system known as “Commissioning for Quality and Innovation” (CQUIN), with local NHS commissioners paying trusts for meeting targets to “reward excellence” in care.
    • In 2012 … the government advised that NHS hospitals should phase out the use of the LCP over the next 6–12 months, and that “NHS England should work with [Clinical Commissioning Groups] to bring about an immediate end to local financial incentives for hospitals to promote a certain type of care for dying patients, including the LCP.

But it’s bigger than health care.

• George -> Elizabeth.
• It is probably coming to your neighborhood, workplace, restaurants.
• So far, urbanized areas are more affected than suburbs, but It is coming.

How should we respond?

• Humility before God (per the psalm: “search me, O God & know my heart” …
• Knowledge that for anyone who is breathing, repentance and faith are still possible.
• Prayer for our neighbors.
• ASK What would we do if a transgendered person or a flamboyantly homosexual person came to worship at Wildwood? What would you do?
  • 1 Cor 6:11 “… and such were some of you.”
• Knowing the Gospel and being ready to share it:
  • In a short sentence: “Christ came into the world to save sinners.” I Tim 1:15
  • In a longer sentence: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:3–4
  • In a familiar sentence: “For God so loved the world that he sent his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

Not necessarily warm and comforting

Phil Johnson once again splits the goalpost.

Looking around

In this essay, the inimitable Frank Turk laments that when he moved to Little Rock he was unable to find a Southern Baptist church that looked, well, like a church in 2 years of looking. This is at once what I want to say and convicting to me with respect to my own behavior.

Offensive line in the sand

Once again, 120 years ago, Charles Spurgeon said something yesterday.

Worship of Idols

I have not (yet) read the articles that this article points to, but they come from a trusted source. Bob Kauflin is an associate of C.J. Mahaney. If you don't know who that is, you should find out.

Update: I have now read these, and I recommend them highly.

Elders and pastors

The post that follows started life as an email I was drafting last summer. I never finished it, so I never got around to sending it. The thoughts here are rough, but I submit them for your comment anyway.

I've been thinking about the whole subject of elders that we were talking about the other day, and I came up with a few random thoughts.

• There's nothing inherent in the NT about the elders of a church being the church staff. By analogy, the U.S. government does not put ultimate power into the hands of any one man, or even any one branch of government. A church may be free to implement that, but it is a questionable choice, since a staff might become insulated from the members it's supposed to be leading. Which means …
• Having "lay elders" in addition to the ones on the pastoral staff might be a good idea. (Scripturally, this is a position I am not qualified for, BTW.)
• Traditionally, Baptists have taken one of two equally wrong tacks:
  • Pastor as the only elder
  • Deacons as defacto elders
• Not having the organizational structure written and knowingly agreed to means some people will become disgruntled. This used to be done via a church covenant and bylaws members understood and agreed to abide by. If there are bylaws they should be published to the members. If the bylaws don't express the way things are done, one or the other should be changed. I.e., yes, leaders are accountable to God, but they are also accountable to the congregation.
• Baptists have always been congregational in their government. As one pastor put it, all churches that are not cults are ultimately congregational: When they aren't given a vote otherwise, people will still vote with their feet and their checkbooks. I think we have seen the truth of that.
• Regardless of elder structures, there is a great danger in leading people spiritually the way Jennie's dad used to lead Jennie and her mom through airports. His attitude was, "I'm going, and God help anyone who can't keep up." That's NOT leadership. So …
• Before great changes are made, the congregation needs to be convinced of the change, not merely told where the church is going, the people being expected to follow. That is, the pastor is a shepard, not a commander. This is because …
• There is a priesthood of all believers (not a priesthood of the individual, BTW).
• The senior pastor is not just another elder, he is the chief among equals, setting the direction for the staff and persuading the people to follow. After all, if where the elders lead is scriptural, old, ingrained patterns may need to be overcome. This takes time. You persuade a friend by showing him the truth from Scripture, not by clonking him with a 2x4. (The 2x4 is for people who are in wilfull sin. But I digress.) But …
• The senior pastor and the other elders, in order to be able to lead, must first learn to listen, learn, and love.

Got any thoughts?

Sacrament?

If we're Baptists, why do we treat the invitation (which isn't even found in the Bible anything like the way we practice it) as more of a sacrament than the Lord's Supper?

If we don't have a liturgical year, why do we sing Christmas songs every December?

Why do we talk about “listening to God” when we aren't writing a new book of the Bible?

Emotional response

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.

Sermons

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:

1. Is Jesus mentioned?
2. Is Jesus the subject or the object of the verbs?
3. What are the verbs?

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:

• Did Jesus have to die for this to make any kind of sense?

Friendly Fire or Faithful Wounds?

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.

1. The motivation: I surmise from the timing that Phil started this series as a result of a sermon (about an hour long) and a speech (about an hour and a half long) given by Mark Driscoll (I'll call him Mark from now on), both freely available for download or in the Mars Hill podcast, founding pastor and usual preacher at Mars Hill Church in Seattle (not to be confused with that other Mars Hill). If you only have time for one, pick the speech. In both, Mark makes much of the word “contextualization,” by which he means translating the Gospel into terms that are understandable in the culture in which it is being proclaimed.
2. The problem: As Phil sees it, some have bent “contextualization” in a church planting context or missionary context into a shape that means “syncretism,” the adopting of pagan practices and beliefs as Christian. There are some for whom this is undeniably true, e.g., Doug Pagett or Rob Bell.
3. The implication (or the inference Phil seems to want us to draw): Mark should be avoided because he uses a word others use to mean something different. Further, since Mark's church participates in “worldly practices” as a church (this is the subject of previous blog posts and/or comments), even his detailed declarations of orthodoxy (right Biblical belief) are suspect.
4. The method: Phil begins the discussion by deconstructing (!) the word “contextualize”.
5. More method: Phil disputes the claim by the postmoderns that Paul the apostle in Acts 17 “affirmed” the culture in Athens in any way. Rather, Paul's strategy was to declare the Gospel as a contradiction of their culture and beliefs by “[unpacking] the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection and proclaim it with clarity”.

Analysis

1. There are several things Phil is right about.
1. Phil rightly protests the fact that the definition of “contextualize” is in general difficult to pin down.
2. Deconstruction can be a useful tool in “tearing down strongholds” of unbelief.
3. Using a word that is so wide open to interpretation that it has to be explained every time you say it to know which of the variegated meanings you intend is burdensome on both the speaker and the listener. In deconstructing “contextualize,” Phil is pointing out that many of the folks who are saying it are putting themselves in the position of Humpty Dumpty in Through The Looking Glass: (‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that's all.’).
4. Some of the people saying “contextualization” have bad theology and mean bad things when they use this particular word. The same thing could be said of those who abuse a word like “love.” As the old song says, “We say we love Coca-Cola, and we love mother's hot apple pie.” (Is anyone old enough to recognize that reference?)
5. Much of what goes on in the culture around us is questionable at best. Television, movies, music are all unreliable sources of belief. Or reliable sources of unbelief.
6. No one objects to translating the Gospel into understandable terms so people within a culture are able to understand it. (Phil said this in one of the comment threads.)
2. There are, however, several assumptions that lie under what Phil has said, and it is useful to bring them to the surface for examination .
1. Anyone who uses a word for which the definition across the spectrum of those who use it is fluid or even nebulous is automatically suspect, a kind of “guilt by vocabulary.”

   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.

2. In protesting that the culture is opposed to the Gospel (which is true of every secular culture) Phil has implicitly embraced the notion that there is such a thing as a “Christian culture.”

   Evaluation: There's no problem with that statement as such. There are, however, two questions we must frequently ask ourselves:

   1. What part of what has grown up in our churches, what part of our culture, is extra-Biblical?
   2. What part of the Christian culture is therefore disposable?

   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?

3. Phil's series and the comments of many might be construed by some as friendly fire, i.e., the shooting of one's compatriots and allies. However, I believe Phil is engaged in polemics, the way you argue with your friends over some principle or doctrine you disagree about. I think Phil would get more yardage of substance (to mix metaphors) out of his disagreement with Mark over continuationalism. But in the present discussion, Phil is really talking more about others in the debate, and Mark gets drawn in via guilt by vocabulary (he said, repeating himself).

Thoughts, anyone?