By calling them, along with the marrieds, to repent and believe the gospel. I don’t want to diminish the hardship. The church is full of single people wishing they weren’t single. I do, however, want to suggest that such questions mean little to the work and calling of the church.
The church has a call to deal with people as people. Each of us, parent and child, married and single, man and woman, tall and short, do not have our final identity in those distinctions, but in Christ. What I needed as a single man is what I need as a husband is what I needed as a boy- Word and sacrament. The problem the church is called to help the whole congregation with isn’t singleness but sanctification, not aloneness but growth in grace.
That is not to say, of course, that the church has no calling relative to different life circumstances. Widows in certain circumstances are to be cared for. Both the elders and the deacons have a calling to serve faithfully those who are not blessed with husbands. Younger men are to be taught by older men, younger women by older women. Certainly a church vibrant with family life can lose sight of these specific callings, and ought not to do so. The danger, however, on the other side of the horse, is dividing our congregations into different demographics with different programs. Isn’t it ironic that the one place the Bible speaks of older and younger men, older and younger women, it speaks of bringing them together rather than keeping them apart (Titus 2)?
For those who feel that awkwardness, my best counsel is to seek to get over it. Singles may not feel like they have much in common with bustling young families. Marrieds might feel like we don’t have much in common with singles. But we have in common all the things that matter most- we have been reborn, redeemed. We are being remade, and will all one day be like Him, seeing Him as He is.
The church is a family of families. It is one family together, and thus no member therein is without family. Families, however, don’t need programs. They merely need to love and welcome one another, to practice hospitality. They need to sacrifice one for another, and encourage one another on to righteousness. But the “they” I’m speaking of is all the members of the church. Singles need to not merely ask of the church, “What are you doing for me?” but also, “How can I serve this body?” Every family member participates in the work of the family. Those called to lead the church lead the church to do the work of the church:
And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; (Ephesians 4:11-13).
It can happen even in careful systematic theology. How much more so in popular parlance? We take what the Bible actually teaches, rephrase it so we can understand it, and end up believing our own phrasing, rather than the actual biblical truth. It’s not malicious, but it is dangerous. What follows are four common thoughts, common expressions, within the evangelical church that just aren’t so.
“All sins are equal in the sight of God.” Well, no. It is true enough that every sin is worthy of God’s eternal wrath. It is true enough that if we have broken part of the law we have broken the law (James actually says this.) It is true enough that unjust anger is a violation of the commandment against murder (Jesus actually says this.) None of this, however, means all sins are equal in the sight of God. To say that because all sins deserve eternal wrath means they are all equal is like saying that all numbers over 100 are equal. The truth is that Jesus said of the Pharisees that while they rightly tithed their mint and their cumin, they neglected the weightier matters of the law (Matthew 23:23). No sin is weightless, but some weigh more than others.
“Hell is the absence of God.” Well, no. If God is omnipresent, and He is, is there anywhere He can not be? David understood this, and thus affirmed, “If I make my bed in Sheol, Thou art there” (Psalm 139:8). Hell isn’t the absence of God, but the presence of His wrath. God is there, but His grace, His kindness, His peace are not. God is the great horror of hell.
“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Well, not if your name is Esau. Okay, there certainly is a kind of universal love that God has for all mankind. And certainly all those who repent and believe will be blessed. And certainly God calls all men everywhere to repent. But it is also true that God has prepared vessels for destruction (Romans 9:22). Being prepared for destruction likely wouldn’t be considered “wonderful” by anyone. We don’t know God’s hidden plans, and thus should preach the gospel to all the world. But we shouldn’t, in so preaching, promise what He hasn’t promised.
“Money is the root of all evil.” Well, no. Actually this one is wrong on two counts. First, the text (I Timothy 6:10) tells us that it is the love of money, not money, and that it is all sorts of evil, not all evil. If money were the root of all evil, all we would need to do to bring paradise on earth would be to have no more money. If money were the root of all evil, the problem would be out there, rather than in our hearts. Sin is not an it problem, but an us problem.
The devil isn’t lazy. He will take the breaks we give him. Myths and half-truths are perfect opportunities for us to miss who we are, who God is, and how He reconciles His own to Himself. Perhaps were we more faithful to His Word, we might just be more faithful.
There is no need to give a defense of the conviction that Christians are given to tribalism. Thankfully, there is no “there is no tribalism” tribe in the church. One wag once said something to the effect that the sinfulness of man is that Christian doctrine for which there is the greatest empirical evidence. Everyone can see it. Our tribalism is simply another manifestation of our sin.
We are not the first believers to be guilty of it. The church at Corinth was infested with the problem, but they didn’t start the fire. The disciples were guilty of it. The children of Israel were guilty of it. The root is sin. The trunk is pride. Tribalism is the branches.
First, tribalism feeds off our need to think our distinctions are what earn God’s favor. Thinking that because I believe in the doctrines of grace, or because I’m missional, or because I’m open to the Spirit at work, or because I have maintained a place at someone else’s table, all of them are nothing more than hooks to hang our self-justification hats on. It is the ground of our higher life, second blessing that sets us higher than the poor benighted fools that will only make it into heaven by the skin of their teeth.
Second, tribalism feeds our need to be in the inner circle, also a function of pride. We create our He-man Egalitarian Hater’s Club or our Knox-ious Arminian Bible Thumping Club or our More Winsome Than Thou Chamberlain Club we not only get to look down our individual noses at other believers but also get to learn the secret handshake, the quote the acceptable sages to one another. We get to belong. That hunger to be in the inner circle is not silly little temptation. It did great damage to the body in birthing Gnosticism and does so today in sustaining Gnosticism.
Third, tribalism gives us a battlefield where we can win glory. When we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness we will acquire no medals for extraordinary courage. Our exploits will not be recounted around the campfires of the future. We will die gloriously forgotten. When, however, we enter the twitter-fray armed with 280 smooth characters by which we slay the Philistines in the other camp, we get likes and retweets and followers. We become the champion of our cause, fighting against the cause of our Champion.
Which brings us to the solution. We need to repent and believe the gospel. Not create the Repent and Believe the Gospel tribe, but to actually repent and believe the gospel. We are together, every believer out there, the compromised and the worldly, the pure and the disdainful, the sound and the wacky, full enough of blindness, sin, pride, folly, that not one of us has any business looking down our noses at others. We are together bought with a price, precious in the sight of our Lord. Oh the shame that I snicker against those for whom He went through His passion.
Can we disagree? Of course. Do secondary matters matter? Secondarily, most certainly. Secondary errors carry with them dangerous trajectories. So too, however, does turning secondary matters into primary matters. The former may lead in the end to a denial of the gospel. The latter has already done so. Oh Lord, give us unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, and in all things, charity.
It’s Friday the 13th and I suspect there is not a one of you that woke up scared because of that fact. Some of you, no doubt, had other things to worry about, other fears to face. But that “unlucky” combination of a Friday on the 13th of the month has pretty well lost its grip on us. We’re moderns, not like our superstitious forbears with their rabbits’ feet, four-leaf clovers, and salt over the shoulder tossing. We look down our noses at those poor benighted hayseeds farther down our family tree.
Except that we’re just as superstitious, if not more, than they were. Most every skyscraper in America, if it reaches that high, misnames all its floors from the 13th upward, calling the 13th the 14th, the 14th the 15th ad nauseum. Our commercial airplanes make the same kind of mistake with respect to their row numbers. All of which pales in comparison to our temples of superstition, casinos. When I was a child, if you wanted to gamble legally you had to travel to Nevada. I remember when Atlantic City, in its bid to save itself, sold itself into the fickle hands of fortune, legalizing gambling.
Then, the floodgates opened. Today there are six states bereft of casinos. Why? Casinos exist because their patrons believe in luck. Any gambler, from the well-trained blackjack player to the old woman chain smoking Lucky Strikes, guzzling watered down whiskey sours and tugging on the bandit’s one arm knows the odds favor the house. That’s how they make money. They literally cannot lose, given enough time. The only reason then to gamble there is if you believe somehow you can beat the odds. Which is as superstitious a belief as knocking on wood. Just a lot more expensive.
Partly to blame, I suspect, is evolution. It too is wildly superstitious lunacy that is catechized into the nation’s children at state schools. It not only says that it’s possible to beat the odds given enough time but that it’s impossible not to beat the odds, given enough time. It affirms, in turn, this fundamental, philosophical impossibility that likewise ties to gambling, that there is such a thing as a free lunch, that you can not only get more from less but can get everything from nothing. We live in a universe, according to naturalist scientists sitting in endowed chairs at highbrow institutions of learning, where not just wealth pops out of nowhere but universes do. If the nothing can spit out a universe with a big bang, why shouldn’t the slot machine spit out a truckload of quarters with a resounding cacophony of shrill bells and whistles?
He was a wise man who first said that there is nothing new under the sun. Our propensity to laugh at our ancestors for their lack of self-awareness is peak lack of self-awareness. We are just like them. Just as our children will be just like us. Change never comes from the inside because it always is what it is. Change comes when He invades what has always been His. Maranatha Lord Jesus.
He was at least an insightful man, if not a wise man, who first said, “I care not who writes a nation’s laws, as long as I write the nation’s songs.” He understood that what shapes our lives is rather more potent than that which merely hedges our lives. We are at least obtuse men, if not foolish men, when we labor so hard to seize the engines of political power for the sake of the kingdom. It is a good thing that we aspire to see every knee bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. His reign indeed covers all things political. But it is a bad thing that we would rather see His lordship confessed in a courtroom than in a song.
While we rightly affirm that man is soul and body (not as we too often think, souls in bodies), we would be wrong to pass over the remaining distinction between mind and heart. We are two things, the material and the immaterial, and that which is immaterial is at least two things, what we think, and what we feel. A man of integrity has mind and heart in harmony. Few of us are there, however. Excitement, more often than not, is a function of the heart more than the mind. As we consider law, usually our minds are more engaged than our hearts. It is a rare bird whose nerves begin to twitter when they hear, “In re: Carleton versus the state of Nevada…” or “Whereas the charter of the town of Spencerville gives license to all who live therein to….” Music, on the other hand, has charms.
Music has the unique ability to bring together heart and mind, to both teach and inspire at the same time. Music, more than abstract arguments, more than abstract law, shapes souls. We are what we sing. Which is why He who is wisdom wisely gave us songs.
One of the weaknesses of the loss of psalm singing in the church is that we have lost sight of the power of psalms as song. We know that the book of Psalms is God’s Word. We know that the Psalms contain wisdom. We may even read and study them in an attempt to internalize the wisdom they contain. They become fodder for sermons, proof texts for sundry theological positions. But that’s not the way God intended us to be shaped by the Psalms. He wrote them so that we would sing them. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that this is all we might sing. Sadly, however, too many of us who conclude we may sing songs that are not Psalms don’t take the trouble to sing the Psalms. We seem to think our only choices are Psalms only, or no Psalms at all.) Singing the Psalms moves their wisdom from our brains into our hearts. And our hearts are the font of our actions, our lives.
It seems even the world is beginning to figure this out. A recent study (apparently sponsored by the Institute for the Incredibly Obvious) demonstrated that the more teenagers are exposed to sexually explicit media, whether it be television, video games, movies, or music, the more likely they were to engage in sexual behavior at an earlier age. The world has not yet passed laws requiring teenagers to be sexually active. While we’re busy creating political action committees to keep condoms out of “our” schools, while we push for “abstinence training” in “our” schools, “our” playlists are telling us (and forgive the anachronism) that we feel like making love, that what we need is sexual healing. The playlists win every time.
If we who serve Christ sing His songs, the songs of wisdom, and the world outside the church sings songs of folly, what we would expect is different worlds. We should expect our lives to be marked by wisdom, by fidelity, by godliness. What we find, again according to sundry studies, is that evangelicals, both unmarried young people and married adults, are roughly as likely to be fornicators or adulterers as their unbelieving counterparts. The reason is likely this, we don’t listen to the music of wisdom, but instead listen to the music of the world. Our ears are as plugged into folly as the ears of our neighbors.
James Adams, in his fine book War Psalms of the Prince of Peace, affirms that the Psalms, however a rich source they might be on the life of David, exist first to tell us the story of Jesus. The Psalms cover the gamut of human experience. You will find there triumph and defeat, confidence and uncertainty, joy and despair. It is because these songs tell us the story of Jesus, however, that they are songs of wisdom. As these songs indwell us, as they shape not just our thinking but our feeling, we will become more like Jesus, who is the very personification of wisdom. As these songs proceed from our lips, we not only speak wisdom, but speak Jesus, showing forth His glory. We ought to be distinct from the world around us. We are called to be a set-apart people. Perhaps by His grace we might become distinct, if we would sing an old song to the Lord, if we would sing the Lord’s songs to the Lord. If we would sing wisdom, perhaps Wisdom might bless us.
